Author's Notes: For those who haven't seen my profile, I've changed the release dates to alternating between Sundays and Wednesdays, to allow myself more time to complete each chapter. In that case, expect Chapter 4 up by around Sunday, September 16. Thank you so much for everybody who reviewed! And an extra special thanks goes out to those who review regularly, such as lovelymomo-chan, C.A.M.I.O.1 and Only, and the anonymous reviewer "..." One of the reasons I've switched to later updating formats is to give myself more time to update early if I receive a lot of reviews that tell me you'd like that.. So of course, I encourage everybody to review! Once again, my apologies for the lateness of this chapter. Enjoy!

Shikamaru may have been one of the tallest of the Konoha 11 (next to Neji, Shino, and Chouji), but when Namazu lifted him off his feet by the collar of his jounin vest, he felt very small. His assailant had proven for the most part merciful, laying no hand on the more heavily injured parts of his body. Shikamaru could only infer that as meaning he meant to break all the rest of his bones, too.

Namazu could sense whenever Shikamaru tried to mold his chakra, and for that offense he was beaten. His wrecked body would hardly respond and was no longer fit to fight physically, but he still tried raising his fist to fight, and for that offense he was beaten as well. He eventually resorted to glaring and trying his best to ignore the pain, but once again he was beaten. At medium- to long-range Namazu would be defeated easily, but now that he had Shikamaru close-by, the advantage was his. Shikamaru racked his brain for answers. Only one came. It wasn't very good. The situation was rapidly deteriorating: he was obviously of no use, Ino was out cold, and he had no idea where Chouji was. Namazu had ripped out his radio before he had a chance to ask.

His opponent was by no means an extremely powerful ninja—Shikamaru wasn't sure whether he could even be classified an A-rank missing-nin—but his fighting style was one that trumped his own under the current conditions. He couldn't even recognize the village symbol scrawled on his blindfold. Shikamaru's face had turned up in the bingo books of Kiri and Iwa, and he wondered if he could be found in that village's assassination list, too.

He was thrown again into the tree. No more than ten minutes had passed since he'd lost the advantage after the caltrop incident (so far Namazu had proven merciful enough not to drop him face first into them), but it felt like an eternity. There was nothing to do but continue to thumb through possible strategies in the hope that the prerequisites of one would somehow check themselves off. First Shikamaru had to inventory his surroundings.

He was injured. Badly. Even if they regained the advantage that day, he doubted he'd be able to contribute much physically. Ino was lying unconscious on a fat branch, surrounded on either side by the twins, so they could catch her in their technique again if she reawakened. Chouji was nowhere to be found; hopefully he'd hidden himself well as an ace up their sleeves, but Shikamaru had to be aware of the possibility that he was out of the fight in one way or the other.

He tried not to dwell on that prospect.

The twins were easy to take care of, as far as he could tell, so long as they were never able to gang up on one person. So far they hadn't shown another technique besides their LSD no jutsu, and hopefully they could be incapacitated before they could demonstrate another. Also, according to Ino, they communicated with each other with some sort of telepathy, making mind-control impossible. That was interesting.

Namazu was the bigger problem, and yet Shikamaru had already picked out an exploitable weakness. He was way too fast and strong to fight within close range, and his speed was also such that it was near impossible to pin him down from any other distance. But he was still overconfident, and had underestimated Shikamaru's abilities. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Namazu's weakness was about to be exploited.

The giant had only time to turn his head before he was hit full-force with the body, sending him flying onto the mass of caltrops. They punctured his back in tens of places, matting the grass and dirt with thick blood. He spat some more of it from his mouth.

Chouji gingerly scooped up Shikamaru in his oversized arm before he could hit the ground, setting him down gently against the trunk of the tree that had served as his torture device. He returned to normal size.

"So you heard?" Shikamaru grinned. Chouji beamed in response.

"Right before your radio died."

Namazu struggled to move, but the spikes on the dirt had torn the muscles in his back. He shakily lifted his head off the ground and spat. "What the hell are you talking about?" he snarled.

"You made a critical error during our conversation," Shikamaru began, staring at the equally incapacitated ninja. "I understood that all of your senses aside from sight were increased, but I thought that it would mean any damage we inflicted on you would become intolerably painful. However, you told me that you could mask any of them that you desired, making a point that the wounds on your feet from the caltrop felt like nothing. And again, throughout your period of torturing me, you stood on the caltrops several times without any visible influence." Namazu snarled. "You had manipulated your senses so that you could feel almost nothing physically. Unfortunately, that's also the way you can see, by sensing vibrations in the air. Because you had closed off your main form of sight, you couldn't tell that my friend was right beside you."

Namazu groaned. "But I can also raise my other senses… and I put all of the excess into my chakra perception… Why couldn't I tell?"

"Only the worst ninja can't mask his chakra. Also," Shikamaru continued, "the Akimichi clan converts calories into chakra to enable them to perform their clan techniques, so there was no chakra to sense before he hit you."

The twins stared down at the victors over their god. Whether they were livid or frightened, they still allowed no emotion stain their faces.

"If you move, we'll kill you," Chouji warned, narrowing his eyes.

"You wouldn't. You need me."

"For what?" Shikamaru laughed, using his free hand to light another cigarette. "Any information we need we can get from your boss."

"You can't find him. He's gone."

"Headed for Konoha."

"Tch," Namazu set his head back on the ground, lacking the energy to fight back. Apparently, under strong enough pain, he lost the power to mask his tactile sense, Shikamaru noted.

"The bartender told us before we left," Chouji explained. "He overheard you guys talking. Raikou and his clients."

Namazu growled and started forming quick hand seals. Shikamaru didn't want to wait to see what he was going to do. "Chouji! Kill him!"

Chouji jumped into the sea of caltrops, his feet resting in safe spots, and his arm released a puff of smoke as it enlarged to the size of a cow. He brought it up into the air to smash Namazu's broken body, but was instead knocked back with a foot to his face. Nari, the white-haired twin, landed next to him and twirled around on one foot to prepare for another attack, which was blocked easily. The smaller companions weren't as physically capable as Namazu.

Up in the trees, Ino jumped to her feet and twisted Suzu's arm behind his back before he had a chance to react. Her hand swept across the surface on the pouch strapped to her waist, and in an action observable only by skilled shinobi, withdrew a kunai and thrust it deep into Suzu's lower back.

No blood flowed over the lacquered handle. Both Suzu and Nari slumped forward at the waist, their bodies releasing all tension and becoming slack rag dolls. Ino took a step back in surprise as her target dissolved into wisps of air, flowing off into the breeze. It appeared the kaze bunshin were a success, and the real deals were nowhere to be found.

"Doton: Koku Hyouchuu no Jutsu!" Namazu finished the last of his hand seals while Team 10 was distracted, thrusting his hands deep into the hard ground and releasing his chakra. The area around him suddenly exploded into long spears of rock that thrust their way skywards, creating a circle of earthen spines. Chouji ran and picked up Shikamaru in his enlarged arm, looking over his shoulder to see the area of effect grow wider at an incredible pace, seeming to seek out its targets. He hopped into the trees to get away, but the spikes were tall enough that whatever trees they didn't rip to shreds were outmatched as far as height was concerned. Ino caught up with her two comrades as they tried to escape the terrifying jutsu.

In the center of the attack, Namazu hung lifelessly, his torso ripped to shreds on top of the tallest spine.

- - -

Kogoe allowed himself to be visibly impressed. The entire battle had proceeded for the most part as he expected it would, but he didn't anticipate the shadow-nin to analyze Namazu's techniques so quickly and thoroughly. It was a shame his body was as broken as it was, but it was nothing incurable. He would have to make sure the boy stayed unhurt for the rest of the day. That wouldn't be so difficult.

And Namazu: he had underestimated him, too. The Earth Release: Black Icicles jutsu was a very difficult one to learn and was considered forbidden in all of the five main hidden villages, due to the fact the user was usually killed along with the attack because of its speed, and because it stopped once their hands left the ground. Now that Namazu was dead and his hands were stilled buried within the depths of one spike, the technique would only stop once all the chakra flowed from his body into the earth. It was not surprising that the shinobi had given his life; his overconfident nature wouldn't allow him to be defeated that easily.

What a fitting end for a worthless tool.

Kogoe didn't bother hopping away from the icicles as they drew near, instead allowing them to form around him in a circle. They would make for the perfect vantage point from which he could observe Nara Shikamaru. The boy did not disappoint. He still wasn't sure what person, object, or idealism stirred in him such emotion, but his favorite part of the process was the guessing. His second favorite was swiping away that support, and turning them toward a cause. After that they were out of his hands.

He jumped on top of the spires as they finally finished forming, watching the Nara boy from a distance. It looked like Namazu's lifeless chakra had run out. All that was left to do was watch the final act of the battle. Then he would follow Team 10 back to Konoha.

- - -

Once the dust settled, Team 10 sat within a cavern of secluded pine branches. Shikamaru rested with his back against a tree trunk, his shirt already sticky from the heavy sap and sore from the rock-hard bark. Ino knelt by his side, her hands glowing light blue from her healing chakra, and Chouji kept a vigilant watch from a few yards away. Shikamaru remained confident that they could win the battle by knocking out only one of the two brothers, but until they knew where they were, any advantage to be gained was lost.

"I'd give anything for a Hyuuga on our team," he broke the silence and laughed.

"Why?" Ino smirked as she ran her hands over Shikamaru's arm, doing her best to heal the smaller wounds before he could make it to the hospital for his bones. "I'd say we could give anybody from that clan a run for their money."

Shikamaru smiled weakly in reply. "Chouji," he winced, finding pain even in the moving of his eyes, "watch out. We don't know the range of their attacks, so they may kill us from miles away."

"Just relax," Chouji looked back, closing his eyes with a grin. "Let me take the center stage today. It'll give me a chance to test my new technique anyway, you know?" He was met with Shikamaru's knowing smirk, giving him the okay to take over as team captain. "Alright, Ino, stay with Shikamaru. See to it that he doesn't get hurt anymore."

"Take care of yourself too," Shikamaru nodded. "Don't go off too far."

"You sound like my mom," the large shinobi laughed. In a flash and a puff of smoke, he became a sphere three times his normal size.

Shikamaru rested his head again. "Maybe when we get back and I'm out of the hospital, I'll treat us all to some yakiniku."

Chouji grinned ever wider, and then rolled off of the tree branch in search of the enemy.

"See? Nothing to worry about," Shikamaru looked up.

Ino sighed and moved to his other arm. "I'd rather you didn't move, Shika," she said.

"No, I'm fine," he tried to shift around, but found himself only able to grunt painfully.

"What did I say?" Ino sat up and put her hands on her hips, glaring at him.

"Trouble woman," he mumbled back. He was met with a silence that lasted several minutes. Medical ninjutsu was not a painful process to undergo, but it was a very strange feeling for cuts to be repaired so quickly, as he could feel the tissues and vessels inside of him shifting and reconstructing to close as easily and fully as possible. He knew that even his bones could be set like this by an expert medic, but when that happened later at the hospital, he would much rather be unconscious. As a shinobi he didn't get sick easily, but the thought of his bones grinding back into place made him just a little queasy.

Instead he looked up at Ino for reassurance. She swore and checked back on her previous efforts. Not very reassuring.

"What does that mean?" he asked, faking a grin.

"Nothing," she replied curtly. "I just forgot to heal a layer of skin in this cut on your arm. It'll still heal, but it may take more time before your body can get it right."

Shikamaru sighed deeply and threw his head back. There were a few clouds by this point, and he spent the next few minutes watching them drift by happily. He was worried that they might blot out the sun completely, rendering his shadow-based jutsu useless for the rest of the day. Not that it mattered anyway; he needed to stay as far from the battle as possible for fear he may be further injured or killed. He was lucky he was even still conscious at this point.

Ino's face suddenly contorted into a look of anxiety as she sat up and put a hand to her ear. Shikamaru couldn't hear what Chouji said, but the message was harried enough that Ino was twitching nervously. He could hear crackly screaming coming from the earpiece.

"Fuck, Shika—" Ino swore, jumping to her feet with a start. She barely had enough time to deflect the incoming kunai—aimed directly at Shikamaru's face—with her own before Suzu materialized at her side, throwing her off the branch with a swift mid-air kick. Nari also appeared above Shikamaru's head, the heel of his black sandal forming an arc en route to a painful collision with his chest. At the last possible moment he rolled to the side onto his broken arm, feeling his bones cutting through his insides as his vision began to swim. The white-haired ninja's foot splintered the worn russet branch, trapping him momentarily while Suzu landed on the other side of Shikamaru. They had begun their seals even before landing. Spinning on his side (and his damn arm), he threw Suzu off his feet with a sweep kick off his good leg. Nari tried to finish what he started with another kick, but his body refused to respond.

"Kagemane no jutsu, success."

Suzu landed gracefully onto the branch and froze. He wasn't caught in Shikamaru's technique, but he made no movements at all. Shikamaru stared at his blank eyes as Ino managed to jump back up to their level with an angry grunt. Chouji was still nowhere to be found.

"Hey Shikamaru, watch ou—Oh!" Ino stopped in her tracks when she saw the three of them standing there. "You got them both at once, eh, Shika?" she smirked confidently.

"No… just one."

Ino raised one brow as she realized that Suzu was standing frozen of his own accord, staring vacantly past his partner into the foliage of the tall trees. His empty eyes struck her as almost creepy.

"How…?"

Shikamaru tried to roll off his broken arm, but the pain alone strained his technique and caused his shadows to waver slowly, though not strongly enough to release his captive.

Ino stood as dumbfounded as Shikamaru for several seconds before placing her weight into one leg and crossing her arms in a display of mental victory, grinning at the pineapple-haired genius. "You're blocking his chakra with the shadow bind, right?" she asked.

"Yeah, why?"

"Well, I think they use chakra to transmit their thoughts." She walked up to his lying form and continued to heal his injuries. Holding his chakra for longer than two or three minutes with a Kagemane was no longer a problem at his level. "It's not just that they talk to each other through their weird psychic powers, they can't even function without them, you know? If you take that away, they become vegetables. I wonder if they can even hear us right now." Shikamaru's face lit up with equal parts excitement, impression, and disappointment at not having figured out their strategy himself. "So," Ino continued, "do we just kill them now?" She honestly hated slaughtering their opponents while they were unable to defend themselves due to Shikamaru's techniques, and so wished desperately that this had been deemed a capture mission instead of a kill-on-sight.

Shikamaru felt the same way, and heaved a heavy sigh that put too much strain on his chest. "We'll wait for Chouji to get back and discuss it, but our orders said to dispose of any shinobi suspected of involvement in the kidnapping of Hakuge's wife." Typical textbook answer. "I think we'll need to kill them, Ino. Besides, hauling back prisoners is troublesome."

Ino sighed at him. Honestly, he could be such an ass sometimes. She finished mending everything she could on his arm (being as she was versed in only the most rudimentary of medic knowledge, it wasn't much), and continued to his leg. Shikamaru looked away as she lifted up his pants leg and turned his leg on its side, placing her hands on his calf.

"Did you get him on the radio?" he inquired, slightly breaking her concentration. She scowled back, "I haven't tried yet, but I'm sure he'll call us when he gets close. Right?"

"Well, I'm just concerned. What did he tell you before those two attacked again? It was enough to get you to start up."

"Nothing. Just that they had doubled back on us."

"Well, he hadn't been gone long. Shouldn't he be back by now?"

Ino's chakra suddenly stopped flowing into Shikamaru's wounds. "Oh shit," she whispered. If he were still tracking the twins, he would have arrived by now, she realized; he had slipped one of them with a tracking device belonging to his family that allowed him to roll in any straight line in their direction with his Nikudan Sensha earlier, and there was no way with his speed he wouldn't have rolled back to the main party by now. Ino pressed her finger to hear earpiece and called out, "Chouji? Chouji, are you there?"

There was no reply.

"Go find him," Shikamaru ordered. "I can hold these guys while you do. But don't take too long; there's been enough pain in the ass strain on my chakra today. Plus I kinda want to go home and sleep once we've found the whole mastermind."

"Not with those injuries, you're not. We're taking you straight to the hospital the second we get back," Ino replied, adjusting her mesh bands around her knees.

"Really Ino, I'm fine—"

Ino thwacked him over his head, causing Nari to wince in pain along with him. She leaned in and put her face inches from his, her brows furled in an irritated scowl.

"Fine, fine… just go find Chouji," he moaned at her. She obliged, leaving him alone with the two homicidal, expressionless dichromatic twin brothers. He scratched the back of his neck with his good arm, an act that Nari mimicked while Suzu stood in the same dazed state. The black-haired brother was still unable to move while his thought processes were blocked. All the better for him, Shikamaru thought; he hated to waste what little chakra he had left holding a second victim.

He wished desperately that he could just kill them and be on his way, but he knew both of his teammates would be on his neck if he did, and he didn't want to spend the next few pain-driven days listening to that. He agreed with them to an extent, of course. There was a difference between a casualty in the heat of battle, when it was kill-or-be-killed, and terminating a defenseless enemy. Even so, ithat was their job as shinobi: to kill. You didn't question that. He looked up with a sigh at his captives, darting his eyes back and forth between their identical faces. He could feel his energy sapping away as he waited, a sign that his chakra was almost through. There was a time when he could hold a shadow bind for only thirty seconds or so. Since then, he had trained himself to maintain the technique for almost ten minutes at a time.

It had been about nine and a half.

He wanted to call his comrades, but Ino had taken the other radio with her when she left. Shikamaru was stuck alone, knowing that only death awaited him once his shadow retreated back under his own body. Before that happened, he would need to finish them off no matter what Ino and Chouji would rant about for days.

Hell, they had all taken plenty of lives before. Was this such a big deal?

Shikamaru didn't notice when Suzu focused an eye on him. He was busy wrapping his own shadow around Nari's leg, making his way up to his neck for a good snap; killing white-hair would forcibly sever the psychic link the two shared, meaning instant victory. Suzu grinned.

What Shikamaru didn't know was that his chakra was too depleted to continue to suppress Nari's, allowing their telepathic link to reform, giving Suzu control again. He wouldn't let the shadow-nin kill his brother. He made his move.

- - -

Kogoe stood atop a nearby brown, earthen spire observing the battle before him. The fat ninja had rolled himself into one of the iron-hard spires accidentally, knocking him out, so the loudmouth blonde found him and decided to leave him for the time being, finding herself unable to carry his immense girth. He was uninterested in them. Instead, he focused his attention on Shikamaru, who was at the end of his rope physically. Suzu had regained control of his thoughts (and, subsequently, his body) and was about to kill him before he could extend the same courtesy to his brother. The blonde would arrive at his position before that happened though, so he had no doubts that he would escape unscathed. Even if there were a problem, the pony-tailed boy would have thought ahead of them. Kogoe could not help but admire his genius.

Such an asset he would make.

Kogoe felt emboldened enough to join the five of them on the battlefield as a spectator. They wouldn't notice him down there, he knew, as long as he kept his genjutsu up. He wanted front row seats.

He hopped down to them in the trees as Suzu made his first move.

- - -

It was blocked by Yamanaka Ino, who sliced deeply into Suzu's leg with a quickly produced kunai. The surprise was enough to release Shikamaru's shadow bind, allowing Nari to disappear into the trees and prepare to launch another attack, this time against the kunoichi. She was barely able to evade that one, bending far enough backwards that the three shuriken missed her body but tossed upwards a handful of blond hairs.

While she was leaning backwards, Suzu threw his hands together into a quick array of seals to activate a Fuuton: Chigiri Ha. The Wind Release: Thousand Cutting Leaves was a ninjutsu that knocked the foliage off of the surrounding trees with a powerful wind and spun them around until they effectively became small buzz saws, flinging them at an opponent. Ino was quick to counter with her own Mind-Body Confusion that acted in a similar fashion to the twins' joint sense-switching attack, cutting or toggling the nerves of Suzu's spinal column until his body was convulsing on the edge of the branch, disrupting his chakra flow and canceling his technique. If she or Shikamaru (who found himself unable to move any part of his body more than a few inches) were to finish the job with one more stroke, that would have been the opportune moment, before Suzu's twitching nerves were able to reconstruct themselves.

Unfortunately, Nari chose that time to continue his assault with two other kaze bunshin, leaping down at his enemies from within the falling leaves. Black tendrils shot out from the shadows of the branch and from the surface of the leaves, stabbing the copies of Nari through the chest and halting their advance. All three disappeared into wisps of air.

"He's not there!" Shikamaru shouted, sitting up with great effort. Then a swift kick got him in the back of the head.

He was blacked out for no more than eight or nine seconds, but when he opened his eyes to a light green haze, Ino was sitting alone on her knees, wiping at a thin trail of blood leaking from the corner of her mouth. He managed to choke out a "hey," which she either didn't hear or chose to ignore. Her eyes were darting around, and Shikamaru realized with disquiet that the twins were still there, watching them, waiting to finish them off, waiting for the opportunity to exact their captain's revenge. This was the worst part of the battle, Shikamaru thought grumpily. "How's Chouji?" he tried again.

This time Ino turned her head to face Shikamaru, and he could see the intensity burning in her eyes that wavered softly as she answered him. "He's unconscious, but other than that he's fine. I made sure they couldn't get to him easily." He nodded. As long as he was safe…

But that further jumbled the already pessimistic mess this battle had become. Ino didn't elaborate on Chouji's current whereabouts incase their opponents were listening. That left the battle a two-on-two affair, but it was a possibility that only one of the brothers needed to be neutralized. Either way, Shikamaru hated the waiting.

When the attack came, it was once again in the form of several shuriken aiming head-on for Ino. She leapt straight backward to evade, and then to the side to dodge another set coming from her right. Once again she produced her kunai from the pouch on her side, using it to block the next two that came from the front, lifting her legs to leap over the three that appeared low from behind. While she was distracted, three more shuriken materialized behind her. She noticed them only a fraction of a second before the first two had sunk into her upper back, tearing at the purple fabric of her shirt. The third planted itself in the bark of the tree branch below her and she barely missed it coming back down. Her legs touched first, but they offered no support, instead folding up beneath her like a piece of cloth, and she finally hit the branch with a thud, grimacing through the pain in her back. If it wasn't a calculated act against one of his own team, and Ino of any of them, Shikamaru might have admired the tactical prowess of the two twins.

They were still out of sight and range at this point, but it was clear that they had used another Jitsudokushou no Jutsu, as Ino was once again hunched over exhibiting the symptoms of the attack, including the sweating, shaking, and visible nausea. Then the second attack came, this one another Chigiri Ha, lifting into the air a thousand blade-sharp leaves just waiting to rip the confused kunoichi apart.

Shikamaru caught Ino in a shadow bind before he realized what he was doing. The weapons were still hovering in midair awaiting their orders to attack, leaving him only moments to make a split-second decision. He could move her out of the way, risking his well-being and broken body in the process, which, as team captain, could jeopardize their entire mission and put the lives of his teammates on the line. Any seasoned shinobi would tell you that this was the dishonorable choice, and hadn't they all heard the story of Hatake Sakumo who disgraced his village by saving his friends instead? But he couldn't let Ino die for certain by not doing anything, and his body was too injured to simply help her dodge out of the way.

Suddenly, the green razors shot down at her, and Shikamaru rolled himself (and, consequently, Ino) off of the branch in order to avoid it. He felt no impact, no rushing air against his face, no thumping heart accelerating through adrenaline. The green film was back over his eyes, this time joined with blues and reds and a momentary burst of pain ripping through every muscle fiber, bone, and blood vessel in his body, screaming at him, wanting to be over and done with. When unconsciousness hit less than a second later, it was a welcome relief from that horror, and the possibility that he would never wake from it was pushed far to the back of his mind by ice-cold relief.

- - -

For the next three days and nights, Shikamaru dreamt of a man in a dark blue cloak.