Unraveling Obito's spool of chakra-conductive wire had taken us five minutes.

Setting the charges: another ten.

Getting into position to wait: one.

Actually waiting: twenty.

During that time we'd checked and re-checked the lines as well as the charges, had a chance to grab a snack from our packs, and wiped out every trace of our presence aside from the trap itself. It was raining hard enough to chill us all to the bone and mask our scent, and our chakra was suppressed as much as we could.

I could feel at least six shinobi chakra signatures in the depths of the valley, clearly attempting to circumvent the front by taking a hazardous nearly-underground route through Suna-Konoha territory.

Kakashi, under a camouflage genjutsu that made him hard to see from any angle but straight-on, raised one hand. Obito and I dropped onto our bellies, waiting for his signal.

Next to me, Obito pulled his ear protectors and his orange goggles into position. Kakashi also had earplugs, but he was mostly concentrating on the view below us.

Three.

Two.

One.

"Boom." Obito mouthed. Simultaneously, we ducked and he sent his chakra through the wires wrapped around his right hand. I did the same, though my wires were clutched in my left.

All of my pre-prepared paper tags went off at once. There were only thirty of them, strung barely under the first layer of muddy rock by Kakashi's expert hand, but that's a lot of boom for an enclosed space. The tags themselves were the strongest I'd ever made, and had been approved by Sensei for this mission.

The narrow canyon's walls collapsed on top of and around the Iwagakure squad, not to mention below. If I had to make a comparison, I'd guess that it was like being inside a foxhole and not hearing "Fire in the hole" in time to do anything about it.

No one got away.

The next two minutes were spent salvaging any wire or explosives.

And ignoring the bodies the best we could.

"We've achieved our objectives. Kei, do you sense anyone else?" Kakashi asked, checking for survivors and finding none.

"I can't feel anyone besides us." I replied, and then handed Obito's wires back to him. "We're good."

Kakashi nodded sharply. "Back to base, everyone."

Obito grimaced briefly at the blood on my hands, but he still tucked the spool back into his thigh holster. To Kakashi he said, "Right behind you."

I spared one glance back for the corpses we'd made, and then followed my teammates out of the canyon. This particular backdoor into Konoha territory wouldn't be one for much longer.

"Set off the last charges," Kakashi ordered.

I did.

The whole place collapsed in on itself.

A lot has changed in two years. Sensei is the new Hokage-to-be. Orochimaru deserted Konoha. I've started to grow boobs.

(Actually, that last one's a lie.)

Let me start over.

About six months ago, Team Minato triumphed over the Chūnin Exams. It took us two tries, but Obito and I were both promoted. Rin was, too, but as a temporary member of Team Minato, her main benefit was that she's now allowed to learn more advanced techniques. Obito and I got our flak jackets in a ceremony that was at least half tongue-in-cheek and promptly hung them up in our respective closets to ignore.

(There's such a thing as subtlety in enemy territory. Village-based uniforms are not it.)

The Hokage probably just wanted all of us to get the hell out of his office. Promotions are great, but they're also less important to the war effort than, say, reports of the enemies' movements.

Sensei was announced as the future Hokage pretty much the next day.

Not especially long afterward, Orochimaru fled the village after being caught performing horrific human experiments.

I could tell myself that one thing didn't have much to do with the other, but that'd be a lie.

Orochimaru was a hero to the village. Everyone knew that. That's why he became so infamous after he ran off to found Otogakure. He's like Konoha's version of Benedict Arnold (only a million times more successful). He's like Voldemort. Saruman the White, maybe. He was great in a way that most of us normal people never would be—the man was one of the many heroes of the Second Shinobi World War. And then he turned to evil because apparently being good wasn't the same as good for Science.

I hated him only slightly less than I was terrified of him. If Sharingan Kakashi plus Chidori wasn't even a blip on the guy's radar, then I was going to be absolutely nothing.

Basically, if and when Orochimaru came back for a dramatic homecoming, I was more than okay with the idea of killing his minions. If the man himself put in an appearance within a hundred feet of me, though, I'd probably hide under a rock.

Not that it'd help. But it was a thought that at least had some merit so long as I didn't attract his attention.

It also took my mind off of what I was supposed to be doing.

At that exact moment, my team and I were deep in the interior of the continent, lying in ambush for a much less famous turncoat than Orochimaru.

Sometimes people turned, whether for money or fame or prestige. We'd only gotten the hawk the other day, and our mission parameters had correspondingly shifted to keep the traitor from getting where he was going.

While there were a couple dozen miles between us and the actual front lines, I couldn't help but expect trouble from Iwagakure anyway. It wasn't like there was some kind of wall that blocked our territory off from everyone else's—the border between the Land of Fire and the Land of Grass was only a political boundary. Iwagakure had been making some incursions into land held by Kusagakure, but they had to fight Grass ninja from their shared borders all the way through their territory. We only had to worry about Rock-nin and maybe the occasional asshole from Takigakure, depending on which way they were swinging this week.

(Since Takigakure had neither invaded nor been invaded by any country in its history, I wasn't sure they really mattered in the long run.)

Kusagakure may not have been big, but they were our allies and there were tons of Konoha-born ninja running through the country. On the whole, our nation still lagged behind Kumo and Iwa in terms of military strength, but we've always made up for that with numbers.

Where Kumo would plant a single shinobi in a traitor's path and expect them to succeed (and they probably would, given the number of S-class shinobi they could field), Konoha preferred teams of four. We were the only team in the immediate area, and thus were scrambled to meet the new threat.

Hence, Team Minato running an ambush.

I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck standing up straight just at the thought. We hadn't been in a border station for three days, but I couldn't help but wonder if that was the last thing Dad ever knew before they were overrun. While I knew that the particular building had been blasted to ash, it was still eerie to realize that, four years ago, Dad would have been out here running similar, if not nearly so specific, routes. No one who had been alive then was assigned to the Kusa border, so I couldn't even ask them about it.

I zipped my jacket all the way up under my chin, frowning to myself.

The chill that went down my spine had nothing to do with the cold.

Middle watch gave me far too much time to drive my thoughts in circles. I sighed inwardly, resisting the urge to swing my legs in restlessness. The last thing we needed was for our quarry to be startled away by me breaking a branch.

That said, sitting in a tree for an hour straight, even with my back to the bark, was making me more bored than I'd thought possible. To stave off the urge to regret my life choices (and the fact that the Game Boy Color wasn't going to be invented in my lifetime), I looked over the edge of the branch and down at my team snoozing below.

It was Obito's turn to sleep the whole night through, and he hadn't budged after bedding down. He'd accidentally taken two watches the night before, due to nerves and because we were so far from home, so he'd moved like a zombie all day. Luckily he didn't snore anymore, or else the whole stealth thing we'd been training for would have been wasted. It had taken us almost two weeks to train him out of it, and we didn't always succeed. He was still sleeping with his mouth open, but he didn't do much more than drool.

Sensei was sleeping with his back against the tree trunk, with Obito and Kakashi bracketing him on each side like the world's most belligerent pair of bookends (when they were awake, anyway). He'd taken his pack and mine and turned them into a sort of wedge pillow, so he didn't wake up with a crick later, and had crossed his arms loosely under his ribs. Sensei, I knew, had been more or less running double-time since the Hokage had declared him the new heir, and in a way this assignment had been a way for him to relax and come to terms with the way his life was soon going to change.

Weird how such a mission could almost be comforting in how routine it was for him, but with Sensei it didn't always pay to question stuff like that. He didn't often give straight answers if he didn't feel like it.

Kakashi slept on his side, back to Sensei's crossed legs. The way he had his metal armguards still on, even while pillowing his head on them, seemed a little uncomfortable, but he'd handed second watch over to me three hours in with no complaints. When asleep, he was less of a porcupine and more of a hedgehog, and I didn't have to fight down the urge to make a smart remark if only because he didn't start shit while unconscious.

It was odd how looking over my teammates was calming, in a way.

We were less than fifty miles from the front, and somehow just knowing that they were alive was enough to make the world less cold.

Wasn't comforting enough for me to allow myself to fall asleep on watch, though. I wasn't stupid, and it didn't, ultimately, change the fact that the particular asshole we were looking for had already dodged two other teams.

Neither of those teams had a chakra sensor like myself, granted (which I think was part of the reason why we were tapped for it), but it was no small thing to avoid an Inuzuka.

Only the fact that Sensei had once again rigged up a security barrier prevented me from being jumpy enough to power a small electrical device.

If I had anything other than moonlight, I could have at least started looking over the scroll Sensei had given me after I got those letters from the Chinatsugumi. They'd arrived attached to a mid-sized package, which indeed contained three scrolls like the letters had said. Sensei had immediately confiscated all of them, and I guess he and Kushina had spent a week poring over them. While the Chinatsugumi had apparently meant them for me, it still made sense to have a couple of seal masters look over everything before handing them over to a barely-promoted chūnin.

Jutsu aside from the three basic Academy ones were rarely, if ever, available to the public. Shinobi preferred having absolute control over flow of information, which usually meant that techniques were passed from master to student and that was it. Konoha's scroll of Forbidden Jutsu was more of a record than a how-to guide when it came to things beyond Shadow Clones. Having never seen it, I could only conclude that it existed mostly to provide counter-strategies to the techniques inside.

Here's an example: While the Hokage would have undoubtedly seen the Impure World Reincarnation technique sometime before Orochimaru's invasion, if Tobirama Senju had been nearly as fond of it as the other undead Kage had implied, the strategies against it were probably in that scroll somewhere. I doubt he got to practice them much, but out of the available options, three of which were nullified by a lack of prep-time and Orochimaru overriding the first two Hokage's wills, using the Dead Demon Consuming Seal was the one most likely to succeed.

I didn't even know where to get started on defeating zombie shinobi. Hopefully, my training in fūinjutsu would lead me to the right path. Eventually.

At least this wasn't that war. Our opponents were going to be human.

Anyway, back to the topic of techniques.

The blue scroll focused on starting exercises and C-ranked elemental jutsu of all five types. I have no elemental jutsu, due to a lack of focus on ninjutsu as a whole. I guess the Chinatsugumi were interested in rectifying that, but many shinobi didn't get started on elemental techniques until they were well into their careers. Sensei rarely uses the Wind jutsu I know he has, while Kakashi has at least a couple of C-ranked Lightning jutsu as a result of his being Sensei's prodigy and because he's a genius. Out of all of us, though, Obito uses his Fire jutsu the most. Elemental jutsu can be kind of situational, sometimes, and I'd gone for long enough without any that I was somewhat hesitant.

Besides which, learning elemental jutsu usually left you locked in with your affinity and maybe another set of techniques if you had time to practice. Unlike sealing arts, where you could learn nearly anything if you had the brains for it, many shinobi couldn't use more than the bare minimum of techniques outside of their affinity. It was what made the Sharingan and the Rinnegan so special. Especially the Rinnegan.

It was why I was pretty sure I'd end up passing the damn thing around to my teammates in the hopes that someone else would get something out of it.

I still hadn't gotten it back, though.

And the sealing and summoning scrolls? Forget it. No way was Sensei letting me mess with those until I finished puberty or something.

Mom had actually agreed with him, which made it worse.

Then again, while I was interested in the contents of the scrolls I got, I wasn't willing to push against far more experienced shinobi about what they thought I could handle. The time to prove myself would come eventually, which was simultaneously gratifying and extremely worrying.

The scroll Sensei had actually let me take, by contrast, was about meditation.

Bleh.

Still. It'd be better than nothing, since no one was going to spontaneously invent handheld games anytime soon.

I reached out with my chakra sense, scanning for anomalous signatures. Usually, I didn't have to focus at all—passive was good enough for advance warning about things we'd have to care about.

Nothing.

My shift, as it turned out, passed without incident. After lounging on the tree branch like a cat for what felt like hours (and probably was), I walked down the trunk and woke Sensei for his shift.

At a safe distance.

The next day was less simple.

We found our deserter, for one. Many famous villains came from Konoha, due to our tendency to produce stupendously powerful head-cases and only belatedly remembering to instill morals when it was far too late to matter, but our target for this mission was neither.

Ichiro Komaeda was a perfectly average chūnin-level shinobi. He even looked entirely average—brown hair, brown eyes, and an entirely forgettable face under a Konoha headband. If not for the fact that he'd been discovered leaking information to Iwagakure shortly after Team Minato was sent on our first border patrol, we probably could have passed each other on the street without noticing.

The problem is that he'd somehow picked up friends.

Instead of fighting a single intelligence-specialized shinobi, we were fighting a three-man squad of Iwa-nin escorting the lily-livered motherfucker out of our territory.

Combat-wise, the Iwa team was lackluster. I cut one man's legs out from under him before following up with my version of Rin's paralytic medical ninjutsu (which she had graciously taught me while I was floundering), while Obito set one of his friends on fire and Kakashi flat-out killed the last one. It was all over in just under a minute, counting the frantic stop-drop-roll sequence that helped exactly nothing when Kakashi killed him anyway.

In the end, all Sensei really had to do was stand directly in Komaeda's path, and the guy froze up like a deer in the headlights of an eighteen-wheeler.

Kakashi, Obito and I finished securing the Iwa prisoner, but I stopped first. Sensei's killing intent was swamping the clearing where the enemy had decided to make a stand.

"T-the Yellow Flash…" Komaeda was nearly squeaking.

"Hello, Komaeda-san." Sensei said pleasantly, but I wasn't fooled.

I didn't want to see the look on his face, and the way Kakashi's eyebrows knit together told me that he already knew what was going to happen. Obito blinked rapidly, staring at Sensei with a face nearly white with fear.

Sensei never felt like that before.

"One false move against my team, and I will cut your hands off." Sensei continued, still in that polite way of his. "Hurt any of them, Komaeda-san, and your feet will follow suit. Do you understand me?"

…I'd never seen Sensei's war persona before. I wasn't sure if he was always like this, or if it was just because his students were at risk.

Komaeda nodded quickly, eyes never leaving Sensei's face.

"Now, you are going to come quietly with us." Sensei went on quietly, as though he didn't have Komaeda practically pissing himself in terror. "We will be returning to Konoha, and you will cooperate. Or else you will have a very personal understand of how imaginative I can be."

Almost without noticing, I reached out to Obito and squeezed his shaking hand. Both of our palms were damp.

There was something ironic in how the scariest thing we'd yet faced was our own teacher.

Kakashi's hand closed over mine and Obito's, briefly. Then he was off, idly disarming Komaeda and tying his arms behind his back.

I let go of Obito's hand, standing and sheathing my kodachi as though nothing had happened. After a second or two, I even managed to force my voice to work. "Sensei, what do you want us to do about this one?" I asked, astounded at how calm I sounded.

"Is he disarmed?" Sensei asked, still using that uncannily even voice.

"Yes, Sensei." Obito replied, instead of me.

Sensei's expression, I noticed, had evened out somewhat. The killing intent had also dropped significantly. Probably because of that, I felt rather than saw Obito get to his feet behind me.

I still didn't feel entirely safe turning my back on Sensei, and I wasn't sure why. Kakashi had killed dozens of people in front of me, I'd killed at least ten already, and Sensei's total probably wasn't worth thinking about. Obito had killed too, though less so than the rest of us.

Why was this different?

"This won't be the last one." Kakashi said quietly, as Sensei began fiddling with some kind of seal he was drawing on the ground. I could only imagine that he was planning on transporting the two prisoners straight to the border outpost. Or, preferably, Konoha.

(Or...oh. A chakra suppression seal! I had to learn how to do that.)

I gave Kakashi a blank look.

"The last traitor," he clarified, as Obito joined us. "And it won't be the last time we get so close to the front."

Well, no shit.

"Or the last time we see Sensei do that." Obito remarked, similarly subdued. Distantly, I was surprised they weren't arguing.

I bit my lip. Now that we'd all been promoted, it wasn't a game anymore. We were real soldiers. On a real battlefield. And someday soon, we'd be sent on any number of missions without Sensei's direction or even attention, and we'd probably fuck up at least once. Possibly fatally.

"Sensei is Konoha's Yellow Flash. He'll be called on more and more." Kakashi explained. "And we'll be caught up in everything the Hokage needs him to do." His tone and expression were flat. "Deal with it."

It made me wonder, briefly, if he'd ever seen Sensei carry through with threats of mutilation against prisoners of war. Because, no matter how we in Konoha tried to market ourselves to people, we were still a military village. We traded in secrets. We fought with them. And we'd kill in a heartbeat to protect them.

And Konoha, as a whole, despised traitors. Komaeda wasn't getting out of this one.

I nodded absently, thinking.

So did Obito, though he looked a little green.

I didn't…I didn't like the idea. But I understood that this world didn't work like my old one. Aside from the lack of cars and guns, the society I lived in now placed much less value on human life. Why not, after all, when we'd barely had a handful of consecutive years of peace in our entire recorded history? The ends justify the means, right?

Well. Not in my head. But I wasn't about to argue POW rights then.

Fucking hell, I prayed that Naruto's generation would be able to do something about it. Because mine? Already screwed.

(Maybe not forever, and maybe not thoroughly. I'd have to see what this generation's Narutos had to say about it.)

We ended up dragging Komaeda and the surviving Iwa infiltrator back to the border station, and from there we went home. The station itself provided an escort for the POWs, which left somewhat later than we did. I don't know what happened to them afterward, but I didn't think much about them, either. I tried not to. There are some things you don't want to think your hometown is capable of.

But it is, anyway.

A/N: Fun fact: The particular term for the location of the first scene is a "slot canyon." The easiest way to visualize them is thinking of the narrow, winding stone canyon from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which is known as the Siq. The film was partly filmed in the Jordanian city of Petra, where The Treasury (Al Khazneh) is located! They are also prone to flash floods, and are found primarily in Australia, Jordan, and the United States, with some in other countries here and there. From what we see in the series of the geography and geology of the ninja world, the Land of Wind and certain parts of the Land of Fire probably have plenty of them.

It seems to me that, in the absence of any other way to control a shinobi POW or the existence of the Geneva Convention, hand mutilation would probably be a pretty standard practice in times of war. Most shinobi up to and including Orochimaru can't actually use most jutsu without their hands, after all.

Also: None of the major shinobi countries share a border! Between the Fire, Lightning, Earth and Wind, there are a crapton of other tiny countries: mainly, the various Lands of Rice Fields (eventually Sound), Hot Water (Hidan's home country), Rivers, Rain, Grass, and Waterfalls. Out of them, four have Hidden Villages at the moment: Amegakure in Rain, Yugakure in Hot Water, Kusagakure in Grass, Takigakure in Waterfalls (which, coincidentally, is the only minor village to host a Tailed Beast). Amegakure is currently in the middle of a civil war (Hanzo vs. Akatsuki), and will not be joining this party!

Currently, the Third Shinobi World War is divided thusly: Konoha, Kusa, Suna, and Kiri vs. Kumo and Iwa. It wasn't that way earlier in the background of this story, and probably won't be later~

(This also means that Kei and the rest of Team Minato traveled a couple hundred miles over the course of the missions they've been taking! Though not necessarily the same couple hundred miles.)