A/N:

Two chaptes on the first day of posting? Yeah, I have nothing better to do. Hope you still like it :)


The silence after the battle was only broken by my own ragged breathing as I ran through the lightless tunnels.

Not for the first time, I scanned the darkness of the Whirlpool Catacombs, knowing that I needed to get to the surface. I traced the seemingly nonsensical symbols carved along the walls, illuminated only by the pale green light given off by the lichen growing all throughout the catacombs, to discern my location. The fastest way from here would be...

In moments, I was running through the tunnels once more. I knew my way around these tunnels blindfolded, just like every other self-respecting shinobi of Uzushio. One never knew when they'd need to get through the catacombs, after all.

I was in the sunshine once more in minutes, just outside of the village's external wall. Seeing the state of the once proud wall, I inhaled sharply, forced to remember. The wall was now lying in rubble.

My jaw clenched almost painfully.

"Suki-nee?" Rei asked softly from my back. I relaxed my muscles, shushing her softly.

"I need you to do something for me, Rei-amai... Go back to the Vault and lock yourself in there until I come back for you."

"No!" she protested immediately. I lowered her to the ground, turning and kneeling to meet her eyes. She was biting her lip, her hands balled into tiny fists. I studied her for a long moment before sighing softly, closing my eyes tiredly.

"I'm sorry, amai." Before she could react, I formed a short sequence of hand seals and rested my hand on the small girl's neck. As soon as my skin made contact with hers, her eyes rolled back and she collapsed sideways. I caught her before she hit the ground, wrapping my arms around her small form briefly. I lifted her up onto one hip, awkwardly forming hand seals around her. With a practiced bite to my thumb, a plume of smoke rose up in front of me.

From the smoke, I heard a groan.

"Can't you ever summon me outside of this forsaken rainforest!" a deep voice grumbled. I tried to kill the wry smile that made its way to my lips, but it was stubborn.

"Koukyo-kun, you are a frog. You can't survive very long away from water," I reminded him tensely. The smoke cleared to reveal a large frog nearly as tall as I was. He was almost completely a golden honey color except for a black slash down his face running from beneath his right eye to his jawline.

"Doesn't mean I like rainforests, tadpole. Every time you summon me here, I have some upstart jaguar or something try their luck," he complained before glancing around. He sobered up immediately at the sight of the ruined wall. "Invasion?"

"Suna, Ame, Iwa."

"Need me to bash some heads?" he asked threateningly. I shook my head.

"Only if they get in your way. I want you to bring Rei back to the Uzumaki Vault. You remember the sealing arrays protecting it?"

"Of course I do... Can the kid survive my skin? Otherwise this will get a lot more complicated," Koukyo hummed. As a poison dart frog, Koukyo secreted an alkaloid poison known to down a grown man if he so much as brushed the frog. It was very convenient in battle, as the slightest touch could spell death, and in trap making, as the batrachotoxins would remain potent for up to a year after leaving the frog's skin, but it was a pain to desensitize myself to it. I lost track of how many days I spent living vicariously through shadow clones because I was voluntarily close to death due to my summons' poisons.

"Her body can fight it, but not as efficiently as mine can..." I murmured, fishing around the bag on my waist. Finding a blank piece of paper, I bit my thumb once more and got to work, writing out a complex seal. When I was finished, I pumped as much chakra as I dared into the seal, causing my blood to almost bubble like lava before it cooled and dried.

"Is that what I think it is?" Koukyo asked, impressed. I nodded.

"Time released chakra storage seal. I finished it two weeks ago," I informed him idly as I stuck the paper to Rei's chest, just above her heart. The sealing paper stuck to her skin like it was glue and, with a dull glow, began to work. "Okay. My chakra should increase the efficiency with which her body rejects the poison, but with how deadly your batrachotoxins are, I can only guarantee twenty minutes. If you're not back by the Vault by then, get to a defendable location and watch out for her until she wakes up. Get her to the Vault as soon as you can. She'll be safe there."

"You're going into the village?"

"I need to make sure that there is no one else."

"Careful out there, tadpole. If there are no more Uzushio nin, there are plenty more of everyone else."

"I know, Koukyo-kun... I'll meet up with you at the Vault as soon as I can," I promised. Not wasting anymore time, I slipped Rei onto his back, kissing her forehead lightly before darting over the ruined wall and towards the main village.


The fighting must have been intense if the ruins of Uzushio's proud stone buildings were any testament to the siege that had taken place over three tense days. Those had been three days in which I could do nothing but grit my teeth as I heard the fighting above our heads. I still had my orders to follow, though it was all I could do to keep myself from jumping into the fray.

Lying amongst the ruins now were bodies that I was forced to recognize. I still had blank scrolls in the bag I had taken from the Vault to make the proper transport scrolls, but I was forced to use my blood as ink to write the seals out. I left the enemy dead where they lay. The victor could recover their own deceased. I wouldn't make it easy for them.

I worked my way through the village, slowly travelling towards the Uzumaki district, knowing that I would need more blank scrolls to finish the final clearing of the village. There were weapons to be salvaged, paperwork to be filed away, and-

My thoughts and my heart stopped in tandem as my eyes froze on the scene before me.

The village center was strewn with bodies that shouldn't have been there. Masters who had gone to defend the borders were thrown unceremoniously in lines with apprentices and civilians that had been caught in the fighting. The lifeless body closest to me stared up unseeingly at the sky, clouded eyes shining from his scarred visage.

K-Kizu-shishou.

Swallowing hard, I knelt at his side, trying to avoid staring at the deep slashes in his side and chest that must have caused his demise. Breathing deeply, I gently lowered his eyelids before removing his hitai-ate, leaning down, and lightly kissing his brow. I withdrew a kunai and, fully aware of the danger of staying still for too long, inscribed my shishou's name on the plate that had identified him as one of my comrades.

Thank you, shishou... Thank you for trusting me with your knowledge and including me in your trust. I will never forget.

I forced myself to stand and to move along the line, cataloguing who hadn't made it out of the battle while keeping my senses on high alert. No Uzushio shinobi would have laid their own dead so carelessly on the ground. This was the work of invaders, meaning that there must have been enough enemies to survive that they felt secure within Uzushio's fallen walls.

With each shinobi I identified, I added another metal plate to my growing collection, carving into the hitai-ates of the shinobi I recognized. Traditions, even in death and in the destruction of the village, were in place for a reason. Though these plates would not be displayed beside the All-Seal in the Shrine like the previous dead of Uzushio, they would not be left nameless. The funeral blessing called for conditions that I could still provide, sealing the bodies and hitai-ate plates away until I could burn the bodies and find a proper home for the hitai-ate plates.

I continued with my morose work. By the time I had reached the end of the line of bodies, all but two of the masters had been accounted for. I had a sizeable collection of hitai-ate plates. I had run out of blanks scrolls before I had gotten through half of the line, so I had to seal the bodies into small squares of sealing paper until I could transfer the bodies into corpse scrolls. Until then, the bodies I stored within them would be safe from harm and decay.

Taeru-sama was amongst the dead and, after I finished carving his name into his hitai-ate plate, my hand drifted towards the crystal necklace hanging around my neck, where it had been safe during the battle.

There were almost two hundred dead, line up toe to toe in that square. The masters, over twenty of the oldest apprentices, and almost two dozen civilians. They were people who had been friends, or family of mine.

A soft thump sounded from some distance to my left and I tensed, one hand moving to the tanto slung across my back and the other moving to ensure that the All Seal's scroll was safe and secure. Another thump sounded and I recognized the sound immediately as footsteps. They grew closer as I pressed myself into the shadows of the rubble and I listened carefully.

The noise grew louder and shuffled, which I translated as not one approaching person, but at least two. They were unsteady, as if wounded or heavily burdened. I tensed, silently drawing a kunai as the figures approached.

From a dark alleyway came three figures. Seeing the three, I saw red and all I could hear was my own blood rushing in my ears as two foreign nin, both from Iwa, unceremoniously threw a woman, her wrists bound behind her, to the hard pavement. Without the smile on her face, I barely recognized the woman as Uzumaki Yuriko. All I could see was the lecherous grins on the men's faces. One of them drew a kunai and forced Yuriko to her knees, pulling the kunai to her neck and pressing it so hard to her skin that I could see a narrow line of blood begin to drip down her pale flesh. Yuriko, her eyes hard, did not make a sound.

Neither did I as I shot forward, all but gutting the man holding Yuriko before, using my momentum, whirling around and catching the other man in the lung with the bloodied kunai. He fell to the ground, giving a panicked gurgle as he drowned on his own blood.

"Suki!" Yuriko breathed, her voice surprised and relieved as I turned to face her.

"Yuriko-san," I murmured, kneeling down beside the woman. I drew a clean kunai and slipped it through her bindings, cutting her loose. "Thank Kami you're alive."

"What do you-" Her eyes wandered behind me, to see the large pile of black scrolls on the ground where I had been hiding in the shadows. "No..."

"The masters... The only one still unaccounted for is Karibi Shansa."

"Shansa took a trio of Iwa jounin over the northern cliffs," Yuriko informed me quietly. "The civilians, the apprentices-"

"If anyone's survived, they'd be in the Catacombs beneath the Uzumaki District. I was heading towards the district when I found the masters. Whoever was here had the bodies lined up toe to toe on the ground," I shivered.

"And Kizu-san...?" I shook my head to answer her question and Yuriko, after a long moment, nodded slowly in acknowledgement. "I'm sorry."

"He went down fighting, and I am still here to carry on his legacy. That's what he would have wanted." She glanced over her shoulder, one hand rubbing at her wrist, still red from the ropes.

"We need to move. Suna's contingent is going to move in at dawn according to those two," Yuriko said, gesturing to the dead men at our feet. I got to my feet as smoothly as I could and gathered up the black corpse scrolls.

"You're not in any condition to fight. Go with one of my clones and get to the civilians. We need to organize the survivors and get them to the Kaikou ports to begin evacuations."

"You don't know, do you?" Yuriko asked, her eyes pained. She glanced at the ground before looking back at me. "I guess you wouldn't. You've been in the Vault this whole time... I was sent to the boats, to oversee the civilian evacuation. The boats were burning when I got there. The civilians, the apprentices, the other masters... We were all sitting ducks."

"Then it means nothing..."

"What?"

I glanced down at the ground before holding the crystal necklace up for Yuriko to see. Her eyes widened ever so slightly.

"When?" she asked softly. I shook my head.

"Before he left to join the others at the shore. He said that the leader was always a true master, and that he had been waiting for one to appear and take his place. He said, in case he fell, that he wanted me to lead the survivors out."

"... The last true master to be chosen was Taeru-sama himself... You have only just begun to embrace your potential, Suki-san, as a kunoichi and a leader."

"The civilians, the other apprentices, the masters... What is left to be led?"

Unsure how to respond, Yuriko disappeared into one of the many entrances to the Whirlpool Catacombs. When she were out of sight, I moved the dead into the shadows where they wouldn't be seen. I doubted they would be missed for at least a few hours.

Clearing my thoughts, I made another dozen clones to help me sweep the village, not wanting to miss a body much more than I wanted to avoid seeing any of my friends dead. I would rather give my friends and comrades a proper send off than allow them to fall prey to enemy dissection. A shinobi's body was full of village secrets, and every Uzushio shinobi was peppered with seals of all sorts. For any of that to fall into enemy hands... It would be the straw to break the metaphorical camel's back.


A/N:

I feel like crying, actually. I didn't know at this point in the writing process what I was going to do and which characters I was going to push the most but, looking back at this, it's really kind of sad. You guys don't know how this ends... But I do... And it's not good.

That's a lie. It's eventually a happy ending. But there's a lot of not-so happy things that happy in between... Like... A lot. I don't really do angst, so you can be the judge of how I manage to pull it off. As in, please judge it. Especially when we get in the chapter fifteen to sixteen range.

Hmm... More spoilers than usual but I think that's okay.

But that's it for today so go get some sleep. Actually... I'm going to go get some sleep. It's 1:17 now for me and I have to wake up at six o'clock and get to school for HSPA week. Ah, HSPAs... Probably the most basic and intellectually insulting standardized test I've ever taken- and mind you, I grew up taking the NJ ASKs through middle school.

Night :)

Sue

OOH! PS: IF ANY OF YOU ARE MORE ARTISTICALLY INCLINED (see: talented) THAN I AM, I WOULD SO LOVE ANY SCRIBBLY FANART. The cover will be my own scribbly fanart (would it still be called fanart if I'm the one coming up with the plot?) once I get around to drawing something that isn't complete rubbish and doesn't give away all of the major plot elements but for now it's my generic look a shuriken! cover for Naruto fanfiction. And yes, that's my shuriken. I love it very dearly.