Thanks go to Lady Kyuri and Nemrut for helping me edit this.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
A clear sky. Shizune couldn't remember the last time she had been able to enjoy walking the most remote area of the Village, but after weeks of delaying, she had finally visited the Memorial Stone. One of her genin teammates was dead, had been butchered during an encounter with Hidden Mist forces. Shizune could still remember the mission file and the attached request for reinforcements that had landed on her desk before the team had set out. An unnecessary proposal, from what she had been able to recall of his performances during their earlier days together.
Denied. The Godaime had heeded her council for once.
A breeze rustled through the tree tops around her, carrying the scent of flowers, grass, and fresh bread into the forest. A small bakery in the outskirts was preparing for the first customers. There was another smell, though, one Shizune couldn't categorise like the rest. It was the faint notion of something trying to be devoid of any odour at all.
She didn't slow down while checking under her black kimono for her equipment. The thin chainmail vest was in place, the medical kit, senbon thrower, and weapon pouch hidden under the fabric.
One more step. Two. She only had to draw this out, and then the Barrier Team would show up sooner or later. If the intruders had set off the alarm, that was. Shizune could hear the rustling now, the occasional cracking twig, a dried leaf crumbling under the weight of a careless man. She smiled, imagining the curse hissed from beyond clenched teeth the shinobi was sure to utter.
Shizune approached a junction; one of the paths would lead to the walls, the other one into the outskirts. There were bound to be shinobi on guard duty at the bulwarks. It also meant lower chances of involving civilians. On the other hand, an ANBU investigation into the nearby residential area had started just yesterday, so the reinforcements she might get there would be more proficient.
The enemy made the question redundant. A dozen kunai whistled in from behind while three shinobi dropped out of the tree tops in front of her. They didn't wear any identification, no hitai-ate or characteristic equipment, just plain dark green combat fatigues, blank masks, and the usual weapon holsters. Shizune ignored the incoming charge, jumped to the left and rushed for the walls. With a bit of luck, they wouldn't even be fast enough to keep up.
Her hope was soon crushed, though, when the quick-paced footsteps behind her weren't fading into the distance at all. Quite the contrary, the pursuers were closing the gap. She was forming a series of hand seals while running. Then Shizune spun around, releasing a thick and purple-coloured cloud from her mouth. Another jump to the right, off the track and into the woods. Some dozen meters away from the path, she settled down behind a tree. Her chest was pounding, rising up and down in frantic motions. It never got easier. She pulled out a scroll from her weapon pouch, tensing the piece of paper between both hands. A flare, shining bright red and screeching loud enough for everyone in the village to hear was contained within it.
Some of the enemies had been caught in her technique, Shizune could hear about three of them coughing and throwing up. By now they would notice the stains of blood on their hands they used to cover their mouths with, maybe even already feel how their lungs were giving out, delivering less and less fresh oxygen with each breath. It was a most ugly noise, to listen how people choked to death, gurgling up blood, craving for air. But she had to focus. Otherwise she might-
The shinobi dropped down on her, the kunai swept for her head in one motion with the descending body. She rolled to the left, and used a small boulder to halt. The seal had been cut in half. Both pieces were still sailing through the air. Shizune drew back the right sleeve of her kimono, and two senbon shot away from her thrower on the forearm. Three left.
One of the missiles was deflected by the enemy's kunai with a metallic clink; the other hit the man's cheek in a clean angle and penetrated into the mouth cavity. Grunting, he pulled it out and threw it away. Shizune noticed with a grin that he didn't pay any attention to the nearly colourless liquid on the weapon. Even if he would have noticed, the outcome would be the same.
It was Shizune who took the initiative this time. She propelled herself forward with a shunshin, stopped short in front of the shinobi and finally jumped to the right to use the same tree she had leaned against earlier as a prop. The man couldn't follow her movements. The eyes were seconds too late to catch more than a glimpse, the body was even slower. By the time he had his kunai up to guard himself, Shizune had circled around him. She slit his throat open with a scalpel while pressing the other hand on his mouth.
The fight had drawn too much attention by then, though. Before Shizune could hurry deeper into the woods, two more shinobi cut off her retreat. For a second, the three just stared at each other. The outer wall was rising in the distance. If she could make enough noise then-
A slight tremor under her feet, coupled with the two enemies in front of her bursting into movement, didn't leave her many choices. Sure that in mere moments another shinobi would plough through the ground to strike her from below, and seeing how one was sprinting in a wide arc to get behind her, Shizune did the only thing she deemed sound. Charging forward.
She could hear the ground being ripped open behind her, as well as the sharp slithering and violent cracking of undergrowth when someone tried to come to an abrupt halt. The one in front of her had drawn a katana and was lifting the weapon high over his head to slash down on her. Shizune sidestepped and, point-blank, shot a senbon from her thrower.
The needle hit the neck, but the man didn't even bother. He instead turned on the spot and scraped his blade over the ground, catapulting dirt and small stones into Shizune's face, which left his blade high up in the air again. He immediately followed it up with a diagonal slash back down from right shoulder to the hip.
With her vision obscured, Shizune tried to jump backwards to gain some space, but the attack still tore through kimono and chainmail for half the distance before she got herself out of reach. Blood gushed out of the wound. A short and superficial treatment with medical ninjutsu in mid-air stopped the flow, at least for the moment. There were more footsteps following her, so the other two were catching up as well. As soon as she touched the ground, Shizune made another, more forceful jump further away from her enemies.
She was about to yell for help, hoping that somebody would hear it, but a collision with a tree she hadn't remembered standing there forced all air out of her lungs. Shizune gasped, eyes locked wide open for a second, and got a glimpse at some fast moving blurs closing in. She grunted when two shuriken drilled into her left arm and a kunai into the right thigh; then she sank to her knees.
Any second now, and the enemies would be on her. Shizune wasn't even looking up; her eyes were closed again, runny, trying to get rid of the dirt. Any second, and the enemies would be close enough to-
She ached while performing the same hand seals from before and filling her lungs with what little air she could press into them. Seconds later, a poisonous gas cloud expanded from her mouth, covering her entire body before being dispersed by the wind over the area.
Her wounded leg protested, nearly gave out, while she was performing the shunshin to get herself to some higher branches and into relative safety. Using the sleeves of her kimono, she finally wiped her face clean again. The battlefield was mostly empty from what Shizune could see; a second gaping hole had appeared in the earth, so they had taken cover from the gas underground. She used the time to pull out the shuriken and kunai and tend to the wounds. After popping a Blood Increasing Pill she noticed that there were moans nearby.
The shinobi who had attacked her with the katana was lying in the open, cringing on the ground. The paralysing poison the senbon were dipped into had taken effect after all, and when his comrades had escaped the gas cloud, he hadn't been able to make it in time. Still, the technique had lacked focus, chakra, and air, so he hadn't been hit by the full dose. That just made it worse. Even inhaling small amounts would lead to death, just slower. More painfully.
Shizune had to cancel the self-treatment after a couple of seconds for each wound, enough to stop the bleeding so that the pill could take full effect and wouldn't backfire. She reached for her senbon thrower, two poisoned missiles left. Low on chakra. Already taken multiple wounds. At least two enemies remaining, both unharmed. On the bright side, though, she still had an almost untouched standard weapon pouch. Meaning detonation tags. Meaning noise.
She loathed the idea of running away. It would provide Tsunade with one more good reason to give her a second shadow, but she wasn't about to take any unnecessary risks just because of that.
"Intruders! Help!" she yelled through the forest while getting up and readying the first kunai. After a short pause to catch her breath, Shizune began to accelerate into the direction of the walls, repeating her screams now and then, always moving through the tree tops and avoiding the forest floor. The first detonation uprooted a tree and sent birds fleeing all over the woods.
They have to attack now or give up the pursuit. They can't possibly hope to get me after meeting up with reinforcements. Shizune was about to yell again when the earth below cracked open to either side. The two shot out of their holes and matched her pace in a matter of seconds, climbing up the branches with each new jump they made. She deflected the occasional incoming kunai by throwing her own against them, but the gap to her left and right side was getting smaller by the second.
The next branch cracked under the force when Shizune came to a halt on it, only one of the pursuers was able to follow her lead, the other shinobi overtook her. As fast as her body allowed, she spun around and launched both remaining senbon at the attacker. This time, though, she didn't stick around and instead simply dropped down to ground level.
One last enemy. The shinobi ignored his struggling comrade and made for the forest floor. A standoff, and for a second, no one moved. They could hear the curses from up above, two bloodied senbon fell down the tree. A body followed suit. He was still gasping, the poison on the senbon alone wasn't meant to kill. Still, falling from this height was bound to lead to one injury or another.
Shizune had armed herself with a kunai in the right hand and three senbon tucked between the fingers of her left. She couldn't run away. The man had proven to be faster by now, less exhausted. The second her mouth opened, to yell one more time, he lurched forward.
She intended to meet the charge head-on and sped towards him herself, then she realised that two more shinobi were closing in on her from behind, one on either side. That makes eight. Two squads. Should be all of them. They can't do anything if I just keep going like this.Only moments before their kunai would clash, Shizune threw hers. A feint to the left side, only to pass him to the right. Having shuffled the senbon in the meantime, she yanked her hand up and sent a missile on the way. It penetrated into the shinobi's skull for half the length of the weapon, just behind the ear. The man gasped once, for the fraction of a second, before his brain shut down to spare the body the pain.
Shizune kept running, a quick sidestep ensured that a couple of shuriken tore into the ground instead of into her back. She pulled out a small black ball from her medic pouch. A gentle touch on a button on the device armed it. The next second she flung it into the air.
Not actually expecting to hit anything with her sleeping bomb, she still turned around to send two kunai with explosive tags through the cloud, vaguely into the direction where she thought the pursuers would escape to from the gas. It was a green substance this time, but not less thick than the purple one from before. Two explosions rippled through the forest.
They no longer havea reason to avoid flashy techniques. If no one comes after these detonations, then they can pretty much roll out their ninjutsu arsenal for good.
Still, the sleeping bomb had bought her time, some seconds to breathe. A Soldier Pill vanished into her mouth, the blood loss from earlier had already been compensated for thanks to the other medicine. Shizune knew that the drawbacks from taking all these drugs would knock her out for a day or two as soon as the side effects would kick in, but there would be enough time to worry about that later. She didn't want to go into a possible ninjutsu fight with her chakra depleted like this.
She was reloading her thrower with some normal, non-poisoned senbon, considering to pull out the poison flask to dip some of her weapons into the liquid. It would come with too many risks, knowing the enemies so close. The leaves above her began to rustle. Out of reflex, Shizune jerked her arm up and emptied her device into the higher branches. A bird chirped in response, and a twig cracked. An ANBU dropped down the branches.
Shizune recognised the owl mask, even with the senbon stuck in the porcelain just above the right eye. Another of her missiles had been deflected by the man's metallic arm guard.
"About time someone shows up, Kage," she said, and went back to reloading.
"They tricked the Barrier Team with some sort of illusion, had them running around like idiots for more than twenty minutes," he said.
Shizune finished fiddling the last senbon into the thrower. "You alone?"
"No, we've got the whole sector surrounded. How many are left?"
"Two, out of what seems like a two squad operation. They've been rather quiet ever since I dropped a sleeping bomb in their way. But I doubt they got hit."
Kage nodded. "More likely they're trying to work out a strategy on how to make it out alive…"
"What's wrong?" Shizune asked, but soon saw the answer herself. Fog. A thick grey mist was crawling up the trees around them, expanding into the woods. "Well that certainly narrows down the list of suspects," she said.
"Squad Four and Seven, move away from the fog, widen the circle," Kage said into the headset under his mask. "You need to stay outside the- Squad Four? Seven? Respond. Anyone, respond." He turned to Shizune and showed her the free patch of skin between lower arm guard and body armour. The hairs were standing up.
Shizune checked her own limbs. Same. After a moment of concentrating, she felt the faint tingling, not on her skin; it wasn't enough for that, but on her tongue. "They've infused the fog with a weak electrical current. It's interfering with the radios."
Kage nodded. "It's not like the squads would've stayed in the fog anyways, so we shouldn't worry too much about our enemies getting away. It's more likely that they-"
The katana was in the ANBU's hands and had swept down on the attacker on the right side of the branch just a split second before Shizune's kunai deflected the incoming shuriken from the left. Both attackers vanished back into the fog as fast as they had appeared.
"…will still try to get at you first," Kage said.
They couldn't see more than a few meters down from their tree, and the dense, grey mass didn't strike them like it would drift away anytime soon. Not without a bit of help.
"Give me your kunai with explosive tags," Shizune said while fiddling a piece of ninja wire through the handle of the last ones she had herself. With Kage's, she arranged eight of them on the metallic thread before stringing it around the branch they were sitting on. "We better be fast about this," she said, shooting a glance at the ANBU. The pill was taking effect, flooding her system with new energy. At least for now.
Kage nodded.
The next time the enemies moved in for a sneak attack, Shizune and Kage didn't bother to do anything about it. They jumped up high instead and activated the explosives. One assailant began to scream, his unchecked landing on the back was accompanied by a loud thwack. Both hands hovering just above the face, Shizune was sure that he wouldn't be a problem for the time being. The other shinobi had been catapulted backwards by the explosion, but had managed to shield his head from the blast and the splinters at the cost of having the skin on his forearms scorched and scratched. He hit the ground somewhere out of her field of vision, beyond the edge of the circle that had been cleared of the mist by the detonation.
The second the two Konoha shinobi landed on the ground, a yell carried over. "Give me some water to work with, now!"
Shizune's initial confusion was swept aside after she realised what the enemy's plan was. A grunt came from behind. The one who had been hit the hardest by the explosion had moved his hands away from his face. It was a mess, bloodied and bruised. Same went for the chest. He couldn't possibly hear a thing, most likely wouldn't be able to for several days. Still, if he was able to cast water jutsus, then…
Two shots from her forearm thrower ended the moaning.
"You want the last one alive?" she asked Kage. "I think one of the others survived as well, but I wouldn't count on that. He fell from pretty high up."
"Would be a great treat for intelligence. Let's at least try."
The voice yelling for water had come from somewhere inside the mist, so, leaving a gap of around ten meters between them, the shinobi plunged into the wall of grey.
Two against one, plus the reinforcements surrounding the sector, and the enemy had been blasted away by a close-proximity explosion. The game had changed.
They spotted him after not even a minute of sneaking through the forest. The man had most of his dark green body suit blown off, his forearms pretty much ripped to shreds, and left a trail of blood behind him. He was staggering away from the battlefield and must have realised that, after no water had come, he had lost his last companion. When the shinobi nearly tripped over a couple of roots, the ANBU swooped down on him.
The enemy spun around with a speed that made Shizune wonder whether he maybe had expected this. She got her answer when he was just releasing a last hand seal, before lightning crackled back and forth between the man's hands, his arms trembling under the strain.
Kage would jump right into it, unable to change his course.
All of it happened in a matter of split seconds. Kage flying straight into the lightning, the three senbon Shizune had launched at the man finding their target, and finally the man himself, no free hand to parry the long needles and no space to dodge them completely if he wanted to take out the ANBU. The katana was drawn and Kage would be on him in a matter of seconds if he would let him live.
Shizune could see the slight adjustments the enemy shinobi made to his posture, counting on her to have targeted vital spots she would have to hit within a millimetres margin. Only she hadn't.
Two of the senbon hit the left hand, the third punctured the forearm. It had been about distraction, about hitting the limbs. And you didn't dodge something like that with shifting your body forth or back a bit.
It took effort to maintain the lightning between your hands, to keep them jumping back and forth without them actually striking your own body. He lost focus after being struck by the needles for a moment and withdrew his wounded hand. Enough time for the lightning to discharge into a nearby tree.
A second later, Kage landed in front of the enemy and thrust his weapon's hilt into the man's stomach. A groan, then the body went limp and the fighting was over.
Later that day, after discharging herself from the hospital, restocking on equipment, and fetching a replacement kimono, Shizune brought the Hokage her noon tea.
"You're late," Tsunade said with her back to Shizune. She was whipping around a bit in her chair and was staring at the roofs of her village through the glass front.
"And you aren't working, Tsunade-sama."
"I'm supposed to drink my tea right now, of course I'm not working."
Shizune put down the steaming cup and looked around. There were no papers or files flying around in the room. The desk was empty but for some pencils and a daily newspaper. "You can't act like this every time I'm not around, Tsunade-sama."
"Kage already reported back to me," the Godaime said, still with her back to Shizune. "Closest call in a while, according to him. They're trying to squeeze everything out of the survivor as we speak."
"It wasn't that bad."
"I bet the doctor you left standing around in the hospital would tell me otherwise. And he would have better arguments to back it up, too."
"I won't have an ANBU trailing me all the time, Tsunade-sama. Not even you have constant bodyguards!"
The Godaime turned around and reached for the tea. She looked at Shizune with that kind of face again, where she tried to give nothing away. Expressionless but for the feint of a smile. But Shizune had seen it all too often, when shinobi, especially genin, had bragged about wanting harder missions. Genin she didn't deem fit for the task they asked for.
"I'll be preparing the dossiers for your afternoon guests, Hokage-sama," Shizune said and turned around, clutching the tablet with both hands. They trembled, and she pressed the tray harder against her body to stop anyone from noticing. She blamed the draining aftereffect of the Soldier and Blood Increasing Pill from earlier.
Ever since Tsunade had been declared Godaime Hokage of the Village Hidden in the Leaves, there had been fifty attempts on Shizune's life, ambushes, and kidnappings. Then she had stopped counting.
Shizune had survived and bested them all. She was doing just fine without an ANBU watching her every step.
The next morning, another pile of files had landed on her desk. She grabbed the one on top. Squad 204, Request: medical personnel.
Shizune flipped back to the front page. A-rank mission; search and destroy.
There was no medical staff to spare, and definitely not for a squad like 204. They are capable. Just a bit too cautious.
Shizune knew she was doing the right thing. That didn't mean that she could stop her hand from trembling when attaching the 'Request Denied' note for Tsunade. Twice, the paperclip landed on her desk instead of at the file.
With a sigh, the documents wandered on a staple to her left. One down...