A Single Cry

Just before dawn an echoing cry of pain had disturbed their sleep. By midmorning, they had tracked its source to a small clearing where dappled sunlight fell in green and gold shafts upon a campsite soaked with blood.

"Only one scream. . . ." murmured Tenten, her eyes widening as she took in the surrounding tree trunks, blood-spattered up their entire visible height, the mulch of twigs and rotting leaves beneath their feet, dyed a brownish maroon, and the outstretched branches overhead, flecked with glutinous drying droplets. It did not seem to any of them that all this blood could have come from a single victim, much less a single wound.

"Their attackers must have tried to silence them first, before getting to work," said Neji. "And were almost completely successful, except for one cry." His voice was calm and steady; to his team he appeared cold and analytical. Inwardly, though, he was shaken.

Whoosh! Neji spun to the right, tensed for an attack, and Tenten yelped and reflexively drew a kunai in each hand. But there was only Lee, his fist in the middle of an inches-deep crater he had just punched in the bark of the nearest tree. As they watched he withdrew his fist and slammed the other hand into the same spot, sinking the hole an inch or so deeper.

"A cry for help!" he shouted, between punches.

Whoosh! Small pieces of bark went flying.

"That we heard!"

Whoosh! Bits of yellowish splintered hardwood were mingled with the bark this time.

"And were too slow -- "

Whoosh!

"—to respond to—"

Whoosh!

"—too slow to do any good—"

Before Lee could hit the tree again, Neji, having recovered from his shock and moved to stand behind Lee, caught his upper arm and yanked him backward, throwing him off-balance and spinning him away from the tree.

"Do you mean to knock that tree down?" Neji asked evenly, as Lee straightened up and turned toward him. The tree swayed precariously, groans issuing from it as if of pain. "Or maybe you just wanted to get the attention of whoever spilled all this blood?"

For a moment Lee's face registered startlement as he took in Neji's words. Clearly in his anger it had not occurred to him that last night's attackers might still be in the area. But then his expression darkened, became rebellious.

"I hope I got their attention! I hope they come back, so I can fight them! Anyone who attacks their victim in their sleep to do this" – gesturing at the surrounding carnage—"is a coward who must be punished!"

"But you don't know that's what happened, Lee," said Tenten, picking her way gingerly toward them across the bloody forest floor. "Neji was just guessing, and anyway being caught off guard doesn't make someone an innocent victim. This could have been the site of a battle between two groups of ninja, or where escaped criminals were apprehended, or anything at all. We just don't know."

Neji nodded in agreement, and added, "In any case revenge is not part of our mission. We're supposed to be headed back to village now, to deliver our report." They were returning to Konoha after a recognizance mission to the Land of Earth.

Lee gaped. "But you can't mean that we're just going to walk away from this! Why did we even bother to find this place, then?"

Tenten turned to Neji, frowning slightly. "Lee's got a point," she said. "Shouldn't we at least have a look around, try to find out what happened?"

"Hm . . ." Neji considered. They were very close to Konoha now, and any encounter of this violence and magnitude so near to home must certainly be of concern to the Hokage. "Yes, we'll take a few hours to investigate. You two look around the clearing for discarded weapons, clothing, anything. I'll scan the surrounding hills." With that he turned his back on them and strode to the opposite side of the clearing, facing outward into the forest. Mollified, Lee joined Tenten as she used the tip of her kunai to turn over bloodied leaves and rocks in search of clues.

All around the clearing, the forest was a shadowy mass of green that quickly swallowed normal vision. But Neji's vision was not normal; he made the necessary hand signs, murmured "Byakugan," and instantly the dimly lit scene before him was limned in vivid glowing blue. The thicket of underbrush was now a delicate neon lacework, the stout trunks of trees radiant bundles of twined blue rope that rose high overhead to branch again and again before terminating in innumerable pale wedge shapes – leaves. Myriad small animals stood out clearly, their glow more intense by an order of magnitude than the vegetation's. Behind him, invisible to normal eyes but not to Neji's Byakugan, Tenten and Lee were like hot blue bonfires, shining with the power they had worked all their lives to acquire and refine. Chakra infused all life, from the blades of grass to the majestic oaks, and all of it, every line, pulsed in time to a subtle rhythm that Neji's gift enabled him to see but not understand.

Neji, Tenten and Lee were the only humans within a 50-meter radius. Neji extended his range out to 100 meters, and perceived, to the northwest, a figure crouched behind a boulder. It was clearly a woman, clearly a low-level shinobi, but there was something odd about her chakra network – the flow did not conform to the usual pattern, but instead seemed subtly displaced, and he could not make out her tenketsu at all.

"Anything?" asked Lee, appearing at his elbow and peering off to the northwest, in which direction Neji now faced.

"Yes," said Neji calmly. "We are being watched."

"What?!" exclaimed Tenten, nearly dropping the large pile she'd been collecting as she straightened up and also turned northwest.

"It's a kunoichi, and she knows we're here," continued Neji. "She's about 95 meters that way" – he pointed – "behind a rock. She's facing us, and keeps peering over the rock to try to get a better look."

With a Clang! Tenten dropped the contents of her arms, drawing a tightly wrapped scroll from her pack in the same movement. Lee also tensed up, then settled into the fighting pose he'd learned from Gai. "What should we do?" he asked, shooting a quick glance over at Neji.

Neji, the only jounin among them, was their captain on this mission. The decision to attack was ultimately his. But he remained relaxed, his arms folded in a posture of measured confidence. "If she'd wanted to attack," he said, "she'd have done it earlier, when we were distracted. She's just watching, gathering information, like us. She may not have even been involved in the incident here. " He paused, thinking for a moment. "But she might have seen something." He abruptly uncrossed his arms and strode off in her direction, motioning behind him to Lee and Tenten as he did so. "You two stay here."

"Wha--" began Tenten in outrage while Lee sputtered, and Neji turned swiftly back so they could see his face, see he was utterly serious.

"She already knows we're here," he said, as they subsided at his expression. "I believe the fact that she has neither attacked nor run away means she'll be willing to talk. And I can tell from here that she is no match for me." Then he took off into the underbrush, making absolutely no effort at stealth.

Lee and Tenten exchanged uneasy glances, and neither of them relaxed their battle-ready postures. But they remained in the clearing, not talking and tensely scanning the dark forest for any sign of Neji.

Within minutes he was back, supporting a short brown-haired young woman who wore no headband and a coarse baggy brown shift. Her hands were encased in long ill-fitting black gloves that disappeared up into her sleeves. She looked quite disheveled, her long hair coming loose from its ponytail and her face wan and dirty. When, assisted by Neji, she entered the clearing, the brighter light there revealed huge bloodstains all over her clothing, most notably on her right sleeve and all down her right side. Neji lowered her carefully onto a flattish rock, where she panted for a moment before looking up at Lee and Tenten to say tiredly, "I'm Benihiko Chyoubi. Nice to meet you."

***

They had all assumed Benihiko's bloodstains came from terrible injuries, but she denied this and point-blank refused to accept basic first aid.

"I'm fine," she said. "Do you think I would still be conscious if I had lost all this blood? I got a few scrapes, but most of this isn't mine."

"Then whose is it?" asked Tenten.

Benihiko sighed and raised an arm to encompass the whole clearing. "It belongs to the same people as all of this," she said. "My family."

Lee started, and even Neji's eyes widened. "But . . ." said Tenten, "for someone who just lost her family, you don't seem very . . . . I mean, you're not exactly. . ."

"We weren't close," said Benihiko flatly, cutting off Tenten's embarrassed fumbling. "I was adopted, and weaker than everyone else, and they never let me forget it. We were a clan of nomadic ninjas who made a living by stealing and murdering. But my only role was menial stuff – cooking, cleaning, that sort of thing. Of course we made a lot of enemies along the way, and I guess last night some of them caught up to us. By the time I woke up almost everyone was either dead or dying. I only managed to escape by crawling out from under our tent and creeping across the ground into the forest. That's when I got covered in blood – there was already a lot of it on the ground."

Benihiko's delivery of this explanation was utterly emotionless, just a dry recitation of rehearsed facts. Neji didn't believe a word of it.

"If so many people died here," he asked, "where are the bodies?"

Benihiko glanced at him through bloodshot green eyes, then shrugged and looked at the ground. "The enemy probably took the bodies. For their secrets, you know – not everyone in the clan was as useless as me."

"Neji," said Tenten tentatively, "I did find a lot of discarded and broken weapons, of the type ninja use." She stuck a foot out to prod the heap of wicked-looking metal implements she had amassed during her search, eliciting ringing and clanging noises as the pile shifted and settled. "It does seem that some type of battle took place here."

Neji spared a glance for the pile, then turned back to look hard at Benihiko. "Of that," he said, "I have no doubt." She raised her eyes from the ground to return his look, her jaw set defiantly and her eyes like chips of flint.

"You don't believe me," she said.

"No," he replied.

"What are you going to do about it?"

Neji's eyes narrowed. "I am going to take you back to Konoha and turn this investigation over to people who will get answers. If you've committed some crime, if you're plotting something, they'll uncover it."

Benihiko's tired expression brightened somewhat as she gave a small smile. "Then," she said, "there's no problem. Konoha was my destination anyway."

Neji managed to hide the uneasiness this pronouncement elicited in him as he had Tenten pack up the weapons she had found and sent Lee to collect samples from the blood spatter in the clearing. From his choice to locate the source of the pre-dawn cry to his decision to take Benihiko back to Konoha, he had done nothing more than his duty. Yet he had begun to feel as if all of this had proceeded according to Benihiko Chyoubi's design.