Previously: The squad infiltrates Orochimaru's secret hideout; Shou discovers something disturbing about the construction of the base; the team is met with an ambush.

I came to dangling by the leg from the mouth of a two-headed lion snake. Blinking dazedly and disoriented by the creature's sinuous, swaying gait, I looked back dizzily. It had a lizardlike body made of a long, fluid torso, which sported also an extended flail-like tail with a spiked end. I spent a long moment just staring. Then the sensations of my body caught up with me and I began coughing uncontrollably, throat and sinuses burning. Collapsed pillars and piles of debris filled my sight before the creature turned and slid into a dark corridor, plunging my gaze into darkness.

It took me several moments to remember what had happened. Then I stifled a groan and found that I just knew, deep in my heart, that I had been separated from my squad and was now being dragged off into the unknown to be used as a live specimen in one of Orochimaru's evil experiments. It figured that Orochimaru had trained roaming monstrosities to kidnap victims and bring them to his labs. He was a mad scientist, after all.

My mouth stung with a corrosive-tasting film, but it seemed that Noru's quick thinking had spared me any further inhalation of whatever substance the chimera had dropped on us. That was probably why I was awake now; I hadn't gotten a full dose. Wincing, I turned my head to inspect the beast carrying me and was surprised—and very, very pleased—to see that it was limping markedly. There was an enormous gash in its hind leg and it was bleeding heavily. I considered the odds—my holster was on the captured leg and the cloth of my cloak was pinned, preventing access to my belt pouches—before I remembered that I had an actual sword on my back.

"Guess you're coming in handy after all," I murmured to it after I had squirmed enough to free my arm enough and unsheath it. Then I grunted and did a curl-up, located the monster's nearest eye, and slammed the ninjato into its face. The chimera let out a guttural screech and dropped me; I hit the ground hard. Then I scrambled to my feet, thankfully uninjured, and sprinted down the hall until I caught sight of a door handle glinting in the dim lighting. I lunged for it.

There was a loud roar as I slammed the heavy steel shut behind me, so I didn't stop and instead dashed across the room. There was another door there connected to a different corridor, so I threw it open and continued to run until the chimera's chaotic chakra presence, full of clashing notes and stuttering rhythms, was distant behind me. As I went I wove through labyrinthine halls, ducking in and out of rooms and looking for portals too small for large monsters to fit through. By the time I came to a gasping stop several minutes later I had not the slightest clue where I was. Winded and breathing hard, I collapsed on my bum in the hall.

It took several moments for me to calm my breath and gather myself, but when I did I found myself sitting in an eerie silence. The chimera's pounding, uneven step and low, rolling growl had fallen away into a strange and stagnant soundlessness; its only interruption was the noise of my own breathing. My comrades' chakra signatures were nowhere to be found. I could not hear even an echo of them. I was alone.

Rising and seeing nothing but hard stone angles and uniform darkness made me feel a sudden sense of exposure, so I stepped slowly backwards until my back hit the wall reassuringly. There was a quiet thump. Nothing else happened.

Well then. This certainly was a development. And after Jiraiya had told me to stay right on him, too… I didn't fancy my chances alone in an Orochimaru research facility. Even ANBU had gone missing here—real ANBU, not pretenders like me. Not to mention my new S-class obligation to destroy myself in the face of enemy capture. Would it come to that, I wondered? Surely even if I died they would come to retrieve me. Besides, I didn't have any handy jutsu or cremation seals.

I shook my head then to chase unhelpful thoughts away. What I needed now was to keep my wits about me and get back to the group. There was no way they would leave on their own. Even if they ended up capturing Orochimaru without me they likely would linger and search for other missing shinobi anyway—it was our secondary objective. Besides, I continued to pep talk to myself, even alone I was still probably the best person to navigate this place. I had been brought along specifically for my intelligence about Orochimaru's activities, after all. And not only was I a sensor, I was also skilled in hiding—

A distant clanging thud echoed faintly down the hall, making my breath catch and my shoulders seize up. Terrified that the chimera had caught up, I pressed my back to the wall and clutched my kunai tightly, listening desperately for any further sound. I stayed there flattened against the stone for a minute, and then two, but no further noise issued forth across the distance. I slowly began breathing again.

"Right, okay." I lowered my arm. Just for thoroughness' sake I thumbed my radio, but as expected no reply came from that. After standing in the corridor for another long moment, I finally just put my hand on the wall and began to walk. There was no other option.

Eventually the wall gave way to another door frame, which I opened. The room I ducked into was dark and only very dimly lit by the sickly glow of a few overhead lamps. The first thing I noticed as I stepped foot inside was the thick dust layered over seemingly every surface. Books and sheafs of paper were scattered about and large scrolls were dotted about the room. Some were rolled open, others were shut, and some had writing while others didn't; but they were all coated in gray and ashes. A huge seal array was scrawled out upon the ground to my left, surrounded by half-taken notes and dog-eared reference volumes. It was empty now but it must have held something at some point. I could see it in the seal components— control, restrain, immobilize.

After taking this in I crept forward silently with kunai held ready and in reverse grip, but the wandering experiment was nowhere in sight. Worried, I cast my senses out again, and—

There. I turned my head. There was an odd buzzing noise—no, two buzzing noises, deeper in the room. It sounded like chakra song, but not quite; it was strange and muddied, and though both noises pulsed with their own rhythms each note of it was on the same flat pitch. Human-like, but not quite; was that it? The chimera had sounded rather odd, but…

With great caution I moved in further, keeping close to cover and ducking behind tables and piles of books as I went. I wished dearly to have someone at my back—Jiraiya, Noru, Akihiko, anyone. But I was alone, so I just kept my breathing even and pressed on, biting my lip, before I finally arrived at the center of the room a small eternity later.

I started at the sight of two shadowed figures kneeling in seiza and ducked back behind a chair in alarm. My sudden movement disturbed a loose sheet of paper; I watched in horror as it lifted up from the surface of the table and then slid forward across the floor, right up to the edge of the array.

"Who's there?" a deep and booming male voice rang out. I sucked in a breath and held it, and myself, still as the grave. My mind raced with fear. I'd alerted them to my presence. Any second now they'd be here, looking around the edge of yonder pile of books, and they'd find me. Desperately pushing sudden recollections of hiding from the Iwa company aside, I scrambled in my head to find a plan. My mind produced a white blank.

Well, shit.

Bracing myself for inevitable discovery, I held still and prepared to strike as soon as my adversary appeared. Several beats passed. Then several more. No one came. Then the voice spoke again.

"It can't have fallen on its own," the man said. "Someone must be there."

"I don't sense anything," another voice replied. Male as well—less resounding than the other, though, and a little more mellow besides. There was a short exhale. "Damn these seals. If I could harness my chakra, I could send at least a clone to check."

What? As quickly as I dared I inched my head forward to look out towards the two shadowy figures again. Then my eyes caught on markings on the ground—or rather, the sealing arrays.

Control. Restrain. Immobilize .

"Prisoners," I whispered aloud in realization. This room was for holding prisoners. Had I found a pair of our missing Leaf citizens?

"There! Someone is there!" the loud one roared. The figure on the left shifted and I saw what might have been an arm extended in my direction. "You! Who are you?!"

"A skilled shinobi," the one on the right commented. "I cannot sense his chakra at all."

They spoke to one another with a familiar cadence; whoever they were, they sounded friendly with one another, if not bizarrely archaic. Warily, I emerged from my crouched position.

"I knew it!" the one on the left crowed as I rose to my full height. "Name yourself, stranger!" I looked at him and, in the low light, made out a dull red sheen that flashed with his movement.

"Lower your voice, Brother. I'm sure he can hear you," the one on the right muttered. Then he abruptly straightened and, with sudden urgency in his voice, barked out, "Behind you!"

With this warning I was quick enough to dodge the snarling swipe that came down on me from above, but was still too off-guard to counter the spiked tail that flew at me from the side. Ah, I cursed to myself, I knew that this creature had still been stalking me—it must have gone around some side route to get past all the small doors I had gone through. The blow bowled me over and sent me flying into a stack of hardcovers, which exploded into a massive cloud of dust and paper and ashes—but not before I had time to scrape my hands across the appendage and activate a wire seal as I went. The chimera howled in agony as its tail was sliced clean off, and I quickly resealed my wires to avoid leaving evidence of my signature jutsu behind.

"Oh ho," the booming man exclaimed as the tail fell and splattered green chimera blood across the floor. I scrambled up out of the debris, grateful for the sealwork on the mask filtering the particles out of my breathing air, and tracked the creature with chakra sense as it pounced. Then I dove aside and flung a spray of shuriken at it. It batted my weapons out of the way with its massive paw, but as its free foreleg was diverted, I made the bird sign and quickly spat out a barrage of Wind Release: Air Bullets.

To my pleasure each one scored a direct hit, and since the creature had been unable to block several impacted it in the face and chest. More blood splattered across the wall, oozing and unnatural, and the beast fell. There it began its dying struggle, yowling and thrashing its massive claws. Almost as soon as I landed I found myself letting out a yell of alarm. The creature beat its hind leg on the ground and the force of it destabilized the pile of books I was standing on, causing me to slip. Then the chimera's other leg, the one with the thigh wound, slammed me directly in the face. I went crashing into the concrete floor, where I tumbled uncontrollably head over legs before coming to a stop beside the right-side sealing array, just a few feet from the silhouetted man still contained therein. The chimera let out another howl before, with a gurgle, it fell silent.

There was a long pause as I laid there on my front, quite stunned and unable to move. I spent a moment blinking against pain and dizzy disorientation. Then, with shallow breaths, I took account of my body. My arms had taken the brunt of the impact with the floor when I'd tried to brace myself after being struck; they immediately flared up in pain. My shoulder muscles were accordingly afire—badly strained, no doubt, if not outright torn. Luckily I could still feel my lower body, though, stinging and throbbing as it was. Hopefully that meant I hadn't managed to snap my spine.

"Has he broken his neck?" the booming man asked after a minute or so had passed.

"No, I don't think so," the mellow one replied. "He is no longer cloaking and I can hear his chakra clearly now. He is still alive."

I lay there a moment longer to collect myself before very, very slowly pushing myself up from the floor. My back absolutely screamed with protest, so I stopped part way and breathed deeply until the pain subsided. Then I felt something warm begin to trickle down my forehead; I flinched as liquid dripped past my lashes and got into my eye. I put a hand on my mask. Even with gloves on I could feel the wide cracks.

"You…" the mellow man, the one beside me, said. There was a pause. Then he said, "You are one of my ANBU."

I turned my head to look at him. He wore historical dress: it was Warring States-era lacquer armor, colored a deep blue and held together with leather straps over a simple black bodysuit. White fur lined his collar, and rather than a hitai-ate he wore a happuri with the Leaf mon engraved on its forehead. Despite the bad lighting it was easy to see he had a distinctive coloring of white hair and red eyes.

…

Was that Tobirama Senju?

As my jaw fell open the pieces of my mask shifted. The motion broke the lines of the sealwork still barely keeping it fixed to my skin, causing it to crumble straight off my face. Tobirama blinked at me.

"You're just a stripling," he said, taken aback. Then I straightened, wincing tenderly, and my hood fell off. He saw my feminine hairstyle and started. "What? You're only a young girl!"

"What? What?" Hashirama—it had to be Hashirama, of course it was—strained to see me from where he was sitting. "A girl? Here?"

"Nidaime Hokage-sama," I rasped, coughed, and then cleared my throat. "Sho… Shodaime Hokage-sama."

When he heard my voice, now unmodulated and obvious in its youth, Hashirama rocked back in amazement.

"What is such a young kunoichi doing in the ANBU?" Tobirama questioned as I rose with shaking knees to my feet. Wincing, I untied my forehead protector and gingerly peeled it away. A fresh spurt of blood gushed past my eyebrow, flowed over my eyelid, and then fell in fat drops at the knees of the Nidaime.

"Are you alone?" Hashirama asked, voice pitching low with concern. Startled to hear it, I turned my face towards him. Now that I was closer I could see the way that the shadows on his face slanted downward. He frowned as I wiped at my face so I could see him better. My hitai-ate, streaked with blood, hung from my fingers; he frowned at it, too. "You should not be here by yourself."

"I didn't come alone," I said tiredly. I managed to take a few steps before falling down. "Uhh—agh."

"You've taken a severe blow to the head," Tobirama commented as I put a hand on my temple. "I believe you may be concussed."

I just laid on my front again for a long moment. Then I put my hands on my face and let out a long sigh. Yes, Lord Second… very well spotted.

"I ask again: what is such a young kunoichi doing amongst the Black Ops shinobi?" Tobirama repeated himself. He looked oddly intent as he stared me down, and I wondered how I ought to respond to this. I was still undercover, after all.

"There's younger," I deflected. And even though I didn't know a thing about any other young ninjas who may or may not be apprenticed in ANBU, I did know that was true. Akihiko was my junior by several months, after all—so long as he existed in ANBU, I'd never be the youngest even if I did join for real.

"What? How can that be?" Hashirama looked at his brother. "Tobirama! You said that you'd care for the village after I was gone—ANBU was supposed to prevent children from going on these missions! Why is a child working as an assassin?"

"I don't know, Brother," Tobirama answered with a look of puzzled frustration. "What of the Academy? Did you not attend?" This he addressed to me. Deciding that I'd rather not spend our entire encounter with him speaking to my rear end, I straightened again, though this time taking care to merely to sit up rather than stand all the way.

"I did," I answered and found myself meeting eyes with the Second Hokage. Despite the frightening look of red irises on black sclera, the humanity I saw there was startling in its completeness. His brow, furrowed with shock and anger, was drawn, and his expression was disturbed. The cracks in his cheeks shifted when he opened his mouth. Just the smallest bit of dust fell from his skin. He was a real person with a real mind and soul, shoved into a stranger's corpse, prisoner to some twisted man's will.

I looked at Hashirama. Their complexions were both a pallid, ashen gray. I cast my eyes over my shoulder at the massive scrolls behind me, all coated in that same dusty shade of gray.

Edo Tensei. Yes, that made sense. Orochimaru must have been using this room to study the Impure World Reincarnation Summoning Technique. The two men before me, trapped in imprisoning sealing arrays, must be his first attempts—or at least his early ones—at resurrecting the previous Hokage. My gaze flickered back to Tobirama.

"You…" he stared. Then he took on a look of recognition and a strange knowing seemed to enter his eyes. I wondered what he had found out just by looking at me.

"I graduated four years ago," I supplied to ease his upset. "I was trained. Better than the others, too."

"And how old are you now?" Hashirama asked.

It was personal information, but I saw no danger in it, so I answered. "Thirteen, sir."

"A ninja at nine. Younger than Itama," Tobirama muttered to himself. I blinked as I recognized the name. The third of the Senju brothers, wasn't it? He'd died some time after the youngest brother, Kawarama.

A flicker of sadness stole through my heart as I suddenly thought of Yoshiya. He'd gone early on into his life as a ninja as well, hadn't he? I supposed it was like that in every generation.

"Little kunoichi, erase these seals. We shall accompany you to find your companions," Hashirama suddenly declared. I started.

"Good idea, Brother." Tobirama jerked his chin towards the array. "Come then, disable it. Don't dawdle."

He spoke with so much authority that I was on my knees and rubbing at the black marks with my gloved fist before I realized I was doing it. It did not stop me from asking, though. "Why, Lord Hokages?"

"Isn't it obvious?" Tobirama replied and folded his arms. "Of course we will protect a child of the Leaf."