A/N This is a slow work in progress, I've had this in my head for a while but I've got a lot of classes right now so just be patient with me please. Also, there WILL be yaoi later on, if you don't like that, don't read this. It's simple really.

Even Sasuke wasn't quite sure how it had come to this, they had been going back to Konoha after a recon mission when suddenly hundreds of ninja appeared out of nowhere and surrounded them. His team had even gone through this same clearing on their way out to the recon site and there had been nothing more than a few squirrels and birds. They had, of course, been given the option to surrender-an option no respectable shinobi would ever take-before the fight had started. As he grimly sliced his way through opponent after opponent he was strategizing; soon enough the weaker ninja would be gone and he'd be forced to rely more on his jutsus and sharingan.

For anyone but their team this battle would almost surely result in death, but thanks to Naruto and the Kyuubi's nearly inexhaustible chakra it would be extremely unlikely if they lost. Currently twenty of his clones were decimating a section of the attacking force while he sent a clone to Sasuke and he himself helped the third member of their team, a new ANBU named Arata.

While Sasuke and the clone of Naruto leapt around, dealing out death and never getting in each other's way, the real Naruto had to constantly dodge the newer member's attacks because he never considered where his teammates were. Naruto constantly wondered how Arata had made ANBU and why he had been placed on their team. Sasuke, of course, knew. Arata was endlessly bothering Tsunade, wondering why he was a jounin and wasn't allowed to join ANBU, he had the skills-on the rare occasion he used them. So she let him pass, but she put him on a team with Sasuke and Naruto because they were the best team-not in the number of successful missions or anything, just in how well they worked together. She figured if they could work together that well, they could handle keeping an eye on Arata as well.

Unfortunately, since he joined their team their number of successful missions had gone down. More and more often they'd come back covered in wounds; one time Sasuke had even been hospitalized because Arata hadn't been paying attention and Sasuke had to shove him out of the way of a deadly jutsu and had ended up catching most of it himself, another time Arata had actually stabbed Naruto in the side because he hadn't been keeping track of where his teammates were and didn't bother to make sure they weren't in range.

Out of the crowd of shinobi attacking them, a larger man with a giant stone hammer came and charged Naruto who was busy deflecting a katana that would have cut off Arata's head. He didn't have time to swing his own katana over to block the hammer and he couldn't move away because of the press of surrounding ninja so the hammer struck him squarely in the middle of his left arm. With a grunt of pain as he felt his arm break in several places, Naruto swiftly killed him and then slowly made his way towards Sasuke while telling Arata to follow him. Halfway there he turned and saw a man with a hand glowing with chakra outstretched coming straight at him. With no time to escape he just braced for impact, thinking the jutsu was merely a weird form of chidori because of how similar it looked. The moment it hit him, however, he knew it wasn't.

Sasuke heard a shout and looked over to where Naruto was and saw a ninja with a jutsu pressed against Naruto's chest that was growing redder and redder until a moment later it exploded and kill the man and most of the ninja around him. Sasuke ran as fast as he could to where Naruto had been flung and found Arata doing the right thing for once and protecting his fallen comrade. As Sasuke reached him he saw there was a large gash across his chest and that his eyes were glazed over as he fought his winded body for breath.

"Arata! Go back to Konoha! We're only a few hours away, run there, get reinforces. Make sure they bring Sakura or Tsunade, Naruto is going to need one of them. Go! Hayakushiro!" Sasuke yelled at Arata as he took up a defensive position over Naruto.

Arata gave him a questioning look at first but then took off running as fast as he could towards Konoha while Sasuke looked around and noticed how many shinobi the chakra explosion had killed and how many were weakened and would be easy to kill. The reinforcements wouldn't be necessary, but Sakura or Tsunade certainly would. Whatever had hit Naruto had hit him bad; the stubborn boy wasn't even trying to get back up.

With a slight grimace Sasuke took off to deal with the remaining enemy before they completely recovered from the blast. Even with whatever it was that took Naruto down there were still a lot of nin left and it took Sasuke the better part of an hour to dispose of them all. That done he sat down heavily next to Naruto to see how his sometimes friend sometimes rival fared.

Naruto was just lying there, eyes barely open, breathing normally for a few breaths, then not breathing for a few more. The pattern was regular but it was not good. It was so much worse than Sasuke had originally thought; while he knew that anything that took Naruto down was probably slowly killing him he didn't realize that it wasn't killing him slowly, it was killing him very quickly. There was no way Arata had gotten to Konoha yet and therefore no way that Sakura or Tsunade would get to them fast enough to save Naruto.