A/N: Once again, everything is happening simultaneously. There are some segments that are positioned later in the chapter, but did not necessarily happen after (timing-wise) the segments that came before them.


Fire Country

"Inoichi's in trouble," Gaara argued. "Why aren't we helping him?"

"The rest of my team is there," said the one ANBU left to drag him along. "The mission was to move you to Konoha, and I'm the fastest runner as well as the weakest fighter."

Gaara bit back tears. If any of them got hurt, it would be all his fault. They were doing it to protect him. Inoichi was in danger for his sake. Having his life threatened was nothing new; the gods knew Gaara had fended off one too many assassination attempts in his childhood. But the idea of having someone defend him while his life was being threatened was new to him. As far as he was concerned, he had always been on his own, just himself and his sand.

Baki wouldn't have done this for me, he thought morosely. Baki gave me away. Inoichi could have just told them to take me and leave him alone, but he didn't. Why does Inoichi have to be the one to get hurt, when he was the one doing the nice things for me?

"Will Inoichi be okay?" Ever since the demon in his head stopped talking, Inoichi was one of his few friends, one of the few people who would still talk to him and treat him like something other than a monster to either fear or kill. Him, and Ibiki, and a few others, but Inoichi was the first and his favorite –

All of a sudden, the tree branch in front of him cracked open in a flare of fire. Both of them were flung outwards, in opposite directions. His eardrums collapsed under the enormous pressure caused by the sudden heated air. Instinctively, the dirt and sand coiled up around him in a protective shell – but the shell burst in a shower of soil and stone when a sharp gust of wind joined the fireball.

Above them, what seemed to be ghostly masks were floating around, smoke and flame pouring from their open mouths. Another explosion rocked the tree they were standing on, blasting them off their feet and sending them flying to the ground. Gaara landed hard on his shoulder and rolled three times before he skidded to a stop against a tree trunk.

He could barely move; there were so many plants in Fire Country, roots and giant trees and vines everywhere, tripping him and bursting into flame whenever one of the flying ghost masks hit it. Thick water was in his eyes. It tasted salty. He hoped they were just tears.

The whole forest around them was lighting up. Gaara tried to beat it down with his sand, but it wasn't good enough. They'd all cook alive at this rate, if the smoke didn't suffocate them first.

All those beautiful trees, going up in smoke. Gaara knew they'd grow back, but it hurt to watch them die all the same; he had come from a land where even the tiniest bit of green was cherished, and to see them go to brown and black so quickly – this forest was generations in the making and now it was burning to the ground before his eyes…how long did it take for this place to grow, and how quickly was it destroyed? All that hard work, gone.

His ANBU guard had disappeared.

There was nowhere to hide, and nowhere to run, not that he could possibly leave while Inoichi was still out there somewhere.

Gaara gathered up his sand and ran back.


The Road from Suna

They hadn't wasted any time. Sunagakure would always be there, but this particular attack was not one they could leave alone. Inoichi Yamanaka was transporting a prisoner of very high priority – as in, the same type of priority that lived under the seal on Naruto's stomach – and if they failed in that mission the consequences would be severe.

He technically wasn't supposed to have access to any of this information, but thanks to a childhood well-spent poking his nose into places that were frankly none of his business, the Sandaime had given up on keeping him out of classified intel a long time ago. He was a ninja, after all, and any lock he could pick was fair game.

Ino had told him that she didn't think he was bad-tempered or selfish. Trouble was, the part about him being bad-tempered and selfish was also false; he hadn't changed his nature since he was small. Just his values, just his ability to pretend. Whatever selfless acts he performed all had a basis in selfishness.

Naruto. Shikamaru. Ino. Truly, you've become brave young men and women in your own right. They were so strong, so intelligent. Gods, please don't take them from me. Please, don't, just don't. Not for my sake – I know I deserve whatever bad luck I get thrown at me − but for theirs.

Please, gods, anyone but them. Anyone but them.

Half of him was torn in going full hypocrite and taking his kids home instead of helping Ino's father, because Naruto, too, carried a bijuu, and they'd be putting themselves in double jeopardy if both of Konoha's jinchuuriki were in the same place. The other half of him knew that if Ino's father got hurt because he forced them to turn their backs and do nothing, his team would never forgive him, and he would never forgive himself.

Besides, Naruto was team leader, and when he made the order to divert from their current mission to assist another Konoha team, Ino and Shikamaru hadn't hesitated in agreeing. If he attempted to override that order now, there would definitely be mutiny.

"Fine, Bakashi. If you're not going to go help, then I will!"

Obito's ghost suddenly had blonde hair and blue eyes, and instead of a boulder it was an empty husk of a corpse with the tailed beast forcibly extracted from it, and so many ghosts were floating by him, whispering accusingly in his ear, (this wouldn't have happened if you had just gone in the first place, and you really haven't changed, Bakashi, not one bit, still as cold-hearted as ever I see).

Fine, I'll do it, I'll go, Kakashi snapped at the floating ghosts. Just shut up already −

Then one of them opened its mouth and spat fire at him.

Fuck, never mind, those weren't ghosts; those things were real, and they were getting closer, and shit fuck dammit in a tissue box.

(Hey, what happened in ANBU stayed in ANBU.)

"Kakashi-sensei," Naruto whispered, "if you wouldn't mind, please watch our backs."

As he watched them zip through the forest straight towards the danger, he thought that perhaps they would be okay.

"Of course I will," he replied automatically, unfurling his scroll of Hiraishin seals. "It's what I've always done."


Fire Country

All the clones Naruto had sent out to look for Ino's father kept popping, and none of the memories they gave back to him made any sense. They kept getting killed by – trees? Nothing else was visible; the smoke was too thick and the fire too strong. Meanwhile, Kakashi-sensei had disappeared, and none of them knew where he was.

Not that he would have been helpful even if he was here. For the past several months, Ino's father kept having to go on missions outside Konoha (the very mission he was supposed to come home from today), and so he'd missed the first round of general Hiraishin-tag handouts that had happened during their post-Wave training break.

Naruto looked around for Hinata, wanting to ask her about Ino's father, hoping that she knew more than Team 7 did, only to immediately dismiss that question when he saw the state she was in. There was an enormous hole all over the back of her coat, and Naruto could see faint smudges of black and purple in her red blistering back.

"We last saw Ino's father about few kilometers that way," Choji said. "There were two guys, but when they heard us coming they split up. If we even want a chance of getting at the other guy, we'll have to beat this one first."

Naruto wanted to say something. To let them know that allies were here. That they would help. Sasuke had the look of someone who had watched too many people die, and Choji had the look of someone who was done with people dying.

"What are you going to do, pelt mud and sticks?" Sasuke asked his clones dubiously, though it was clear he was joking, doing his best to make light of a decidedly not funny situation.

Naruto shrugged. "If enough of them do it, sooner or later, something's going to get clogged. We have more bodies than you have kunai, so welcome to Konoha, bitches, and all that crap."

Sasuke barked out a chuckle. "Can't believe you remember that one; that was from way back in the Academy. Weren't you ditching for most of those days?"

"Yeah, well, Ino and Shikamaru didn't, so same difference really − "

But he was interrupted when a whoosh of air passed over his head. A flash of heat. Without even having to stop and think, he dropped flat to the ground and covered his face and ears with his hands. Rubble and splinters pierced his cheek. A fireball collided against Shikamaru's shoddily erected earth wall, and the temperature of the stone immediately spiked up to burning.

His lungs and throat were sandpaper. He crawled across the dirt, half-blinded by smoke. His jacket ripped open, leaving the mesh armor underneath to cut bloody criss-crosses into his side. All of them were gasping for their lives.

Fingers. Naruto's fingers came together, flying through the hand seals, trained by heart to my muscle memory. His hair flared outwards in a mess of fiery spikes. They struck the Water mask, hitting it in the holes where its eyes, nose, and mouth were supposed to be. He hadn't expected it to work as well as it did, because those things clearly didn't have to see or breathe in the same way humans did. But he saw the mask cough and choke, and he figured, he wouldn't complain about anything as long as it worked. Naruto had bought them some time, the extra few milliseconds they needed.

FWIP

Like clockwork, or perhaps, perfect teamwork, a giant glob of dirt shot out from underneath Shikamaru's feet, and hit the still wobbling Water mask right in the mouth.

SLAP

It pivoted around its neck, a full 360 in midair. The attack went wide, causing loads of water, streaked with bits of mud, to spray everywhere, but there was no force behind it; without any concentration it had barely the effect of a garden sprinkler. The mask and its attached body slammed into the ground, and hacked up a bit, wet, black hairball of grime.

Naruto! Shikamaru yelled over their mental connection. Move exactly six meters to his left!

The glob of phlegm dropped to the ground, bounced a few times, and rolled down the hills, out of sight, where it met its end in a messy splatter soon after. When it managed to steady itself, it was staring straight at Shikamaru, positively infuriated.

Naruto's stomach dropped when his brain noticed the position his teammate was in. Shikamaru was prepared to jump away from the first blast from the Water mask, but not the next one, which took out at least three trees. The one after that almost hit him; he barely managed to jump out of the way in time, and it sent him sprawling to the ground. The fourth one would have definitely killed him.

Luckily, at that moment, Naruto had finished moving six meters to his left, and, the Fire mask, too busy chasing him, got in the way instead.

It sputtered, doused – opened its mouth in rage – but too late, an enormous meaty fist wrapped around it first. Face purple, eyes red, Choji's fingers tightened and squeezed, and the Fire mask, still too soaked to fight back, screamed, screamed, kept on screaming, loud enough to rivala frog with a punctured lung. Then the Wind mask swooped in. Pressurized air sprayed from it like a steelcutter's jet saw, the force so concentrated that thick deep gashes opened up in Choji's palms. Both Choji and the Fire mask in his headlock were knocked off-balance and slammed into the ground right by his feet.

Big mistake on Kakuzu's part. One of Naruto's clones was there, waiting. He slapped one of Shikamaru's amplifier seals on top of a bundle of his customized explosive tags and shoved the entire bomb elbow-deep into the mask's mouth. As it choked, Ino yanked the elastic detonator string back as hard as she could and let the ring snap back upon its chipped painted nose.

It exploded in a million shards of porcelain and pepper-powdered fireworks, cutting through the air with edges as sharp as glass. The resulting recoil from the blowout cracked the other two masks and demolished at least three more trees. Threads flew everywhere. Bits of leathery flesh clung to the unraveled knots, a living voodoo doll, wrapping around all of their ankles.

Asuma-sensei was lifted off the ground by the neck and sent flying like he was a rag doll. Naruto shouted, and about a dozen hastily summoned clones popped into existence, cushioning Asuma-sensei's landing with their pile of bodies.

As the dust cleared, he could see the shadowy outline of an enormous man, all muscle and sinew and stitches; it was a giant walking voodoo doll, straight out of a science fiction horror. His voice was deep, menacing, all dissonant chords and infrasound.

"I will rip you open," Kakuzu growled. "I will snap your ribs off, piece by piece, and drag your heart from your chest so hard your lungs will become your wings, and I will make you watch as I do the same to each and every one of your little friends, too."

A cruel smirk opened up his face from ear to ear like a Kirigakure necktie.

He grabbed Choji's swinging tree trunk by the branches and ripped it in half lengthwise.

"The fuck," Sasuke breathed.

Naruto wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment. But if Kakuzu had been expecting fear from them, he would be in a world of disappointment. Naruto could only roll his eyes in disgust. Of all the people his threads were currently making physical contact with, one of them was a Nara.

Dumbass.

Shikamaru's shadow immediately snaked outwards, following the trail down to its source. Within less than a second he had control. Palms slammed into the ground, and a pit of rock spikes opened up before Kakuzu; his body, still under the control of the Shadow Bind, flopped forward.

His chest alone was pierced in fourteen different places.

Drip.

Drip.

"N-n-n-n-n-n-"

Drip.

Unintelligible moans, punctured with howls of agony, tore through the air. While Shikamaru had turned the human-voodoo-threads wrapped around him into shadow conduits, Ino had turned hers into live wires, delivering shock upon shock of electricity straight to his muscles. As each twitch impaled Kakuzu deeper on the earth pikes, Choji shouldered the tree trunk that he'd ripped in half earlier and started beating him with it.

Sasuke was tossing a pink grenade up and down in the air.

"The pink ones were for Academy pranks," Naruto told him.

"Okay."

"They're filled with glue and glitter."

"To a guy with gaping stab wounds, it's corrosive flesh adhesive and artery-sized shrapnel."

Naruto stared at Sasuke, then at Kakuzu, then at Sasuke, then at Hinata, then back to Kakuzu.

He shrugged and stepped back.

"Do whatever you want."

As Sasuke rolled the bombs into the pit, Naruto's eyes met Kakuzu's for one last time. They were pupil-less with a pretty green colour, the same as Ino's, but they did not shine with her love and life and laughter; they were fringed in red, cold and robotic and devoid of any trace of empathy.

"Kids like you…" he coughed, piercing Naruto with a glare of absolute hatred. "should go burn in hell."

Naruto scanned the clearing skeptically.

The fires still raged around them. The fires Kakuzu set.

"Hell? Hell?"Naruto laughed, harder than he'd ever laughed before. "If you're talking about the hell that you brought upon yourself, I think we're already here."


Two masks left.

To her relief, Ino saw the Wind mask disappear back into Kakuzu's chest. Of course, this extra life he'd taken into himself wasn't helping his situation at all. He was still stuck in the pit, and all he was doing was making himself die more slowly.

One mask left.

She prepared to stab Kakuzu one last time, to finish off the Water mask once and for all, but Naruto stopped her. "There's still fires everywhere. If we let the Water mask chase around some of my clones, we can put them out faster, and find your father more easily."

Ino nodded, but inside her head, even though it had only been maybe a few minutes since they had arrived, she was thinking, Not good enough. We're still too slow. Her father's team had moved outside her mental contact range about ten minutes ago.

Was she being selfish? Maybe. She glared down at what remained of Kakuzu. Why couldn't they just die already? Her father was so close, and yet so far, just a few meters away in a separate clearing in the forest, and yet she couldn't leave to go find him because she was tied down here.

Fighting ugly, weird, ninjutsu parodies of the No-Face ghost from that one movie.

It terrified her, how callously she was thinking about this man – could they even call him a proper man; he shouldn't even be alive – and how easy was it, to dismiss his life as an abomination of nature, to dehumanize him until she could convince herself, all too easily, that it was okay to kill him and that his life didn't matter and that they should just do it and end him already now right away five minutes ago?

But after she had that thought, she remembered all those times her father had helped teach her jutsu, and carried her on his shoulders, and bought her clothes and toys and treats and paint for her room, and she –

To hell with her abstract morals; her father mattered more, and she wasn't about to waste her time getting hung up over some bastard who was no better than she was.

These men were trying to kill them, after all. In scuffles of this nature there were bound to be casualties. They hardly mattered in the grand scheme of things. She was only looking out for her friends here. Was it really a crime to want to survive? From the monsters in Wave Country, to these guys here.

Just how many of these attacks were related? Were they all a result of the same thing? Apart from their team, of course; they seemed to be the greatest common denominator in every single incident. So many enemies. Like in the comics, good guys against the bad guys, but the bad guys were everywhere and what does it say about you, you, the supposed "good guy" of your own life, when everyone you see is a bad guy, when everyone is your enemy, making you everyone's enemy in turn?

She narrowed her eyes. Live or die, she thought, it's all the same. They were all shinobi here. Kakuzu knew what he was getting into when became a shinobi, when he decided to go rogue. She wasn't going to waste any more of her energy trying to empathize with him. She only wanted her father back. All she could hope for at this point was for one of Naruto's clones to run into something.

Or…

"Where's Kakashi-sensei?"

Almost as soon as she asked that question, her mind suddenly overloaded with random blurry pictures, white trees against black smoke. Her head spun as his rapidly flickering field of vision skittered through her mind. The world flipped around, back and forth, up and down. She was watching a badly done 3D movie, with the colors inverted. She was standing on a badly tied tightrope, swaying on unstable ground, flying through the air like a cork floating aimlessly on the sea, not knowing if she was ever going to land.

Nauseated, she quickly pulled back and braced her hands on her knees. That is, she chastised herself, the last time I ever try to maintain a mental connection with someone high on the Hiraishin no Jutsu.

Ino knew Shikamaru was never so disorganized. Even Naruto, at his core, always knew exactly what he was doing, and who he was. Was this how teleportation felt, the strain dimension jumps took on the mind? Or was this how her teacher always was?

Her knees wobbled. She wanted to sink down into the dirt.

No, no she couldn't. They needed to end this, and quickly. Her father was out there. Somewhere. Ino tried her best to ignore the debris littering the forest floor. Once, she had been so hesitant to kill, and now, it seemed almost too easy.

Worryingly so.

"Ino? What's wrong? What's holding up Kakashi-sensei?" Shikamaru asked.

She shook her head. "We're not done. There's another one. Apart from…Kakuzu and Hidan."

"Another one apart from…what? Who – "

Ino pointed, and, as the last of the forest fires receded, they finally saw what was hiding behind the wall of smoke. "While we were fighting Kakuzu, he's been keeping all of those things away from us, all on his own."

They were everywhere, a veritable army of them.

The white trees.

White trees with yellow faces and the teeth of carnivores.

Zetsu.

Ino threw her senses out as far as they could go. Where's my father? she begged, hoping to pick up even a little trace of his thoughts. Where is he?

She found nothing.


Fire Country

Hope blossomed in Inoichi's chest. Allies have arrived; I can feel it.

Two teams. That was two teams more than he had expected to respond to his call for help. One of them came from a scheduled patrol. They were maybe five minutes away. The other was a team returning home from a mission earlier than expected. If they ran as fast as they could, they would make it in about ten minutes. He wondered who they were; his brain was too preoccupied to identify anything more concrete than basic distance evaluations.

Inoichi, in full control of Hidan's mind, swung the man's scythe at his own neck.

Or at least, he tried to.

One moment, he could feel the connection, and the next −

Nothing.

Inoichi felt like he was floating for a second, before everything crashed to the ground. He felt dead. No energy left. Have I really been using that much chakra – no way, I timed it –

There, on his back. He saw – a strange patch of white. A yellow smiling face. And he could sense the chakra. Moving.

That – thing – was – stealing – his –

"Dammit, Zetsu!" Hidan yelled. "Stop ruining my goddamn fun!"

Inoichi turned his head, and came face-to-face with a strange, tall, plantlike creature. With horror, he realized –

Hidan and Kakuzu were not the only Akatsuki members waiting for us today.

"I wouldn't have to, if you had killed him properly right away. He already tricked you into destroying one of Kakuzu's hearts with his mind technique."

"Stop bossing me around! You're not my mother! I killed my mother!"

This guy. This was an S-rank nin. It was ridiculous. He was acting like a child. No, even better – he was acting like one of those old-time, over-the-top villains from all his favorite manga when he was in the Academy. Inoichi tasted iron on his lips, and chuckled, before he collapsed, ears ringing. His head spun. Nausea, too much of it, he could not balance.

A loud bang came from above. Blasting noises, everywhere. Inoichi touched his ears, and felt liquid. His eyes stung. He pushed himself to his feet. Except he didn't. He couldn't move. He had no energy. He was starving.

The spores were sucking him dry.

The dust cleared; Inoichi could see Hidan standing in a completed circumscribed triangle. His face had changed; it was no longer human, but skeletal, all black and white and deathly.

Someone destroy that circle, Inoichi begged. Destroy the circle –

The remaining ANBU immediately threw themselves at Hidan; one kicking dust over the drawing on the ground, the other two trying to push him down before he could stab himself any more, but whatever he had thrown at them, was not letting them balance properly. And so they wobbled, strangely, too strong to stay down but too weak to finish him off. He saw the white spores blossoming on their backs, too, and they all fell to the ground, first twitching, and then completely still.

Inoichi wondered, helplessly, where Gaara was. If Gaara's sand would protect him from the spores. If – if –

There was a searing pain in his abdomen. And then −


BONUS #41

Anatomy of a Fight Scene

fanfiction [dotnet] /topic/185326/164154784/1/Bonus-41-Anatomy-of-a-Fight-Scene