Published: 6/19/2017
The technique… needed some work.
It wasn't the seals. The seals performed beautifully; as I twisted chakra in my palm and carefully envisioned each component and mechanism of it in turn, just as Minato had instructed me, a halo of black ink blossomed on Hayanari's arm just as he was jumping away. A cheerful G-flat chimed at my hip, the familiar sound of my own chakra activating the storage seal, and wire materialized between him and my forearm, where my cousin had carefully inked and concealed the third and final seal. I grasped the mass of steel threads with both hands and yanked as hard as I could. Hayanari's arm jerked back awkwardly, causing him to yelp and drop the kunai in his hand, and he was prevented from stabbing Akihiko in the side.
This was the part of the technique that worked well. The part that did not work well was the part where Hayanari called for Iwao and Iwao dove down at us from the air, landed on the wires connecting myself and his teammate, and sent us both tumbling into the ground. He quickly cut his teammate loose before taking his kunai and stabbing it into the ground, neatly pinning me down in the process. Ichiei sprinted forward engage Akihiko as I struggled free my arm.
With assistance from Akihiko cut off, Iwao took the opportunity to dive on me. After fumblingly taking a knife to the wires, I rolled over and just barely managed to get a leg up in time to knee him in the gut. I grimaced as spit flew from Iwao's mouth and onto my face, but also took the opportunity his choking gasp presented to straighten out my leg and go for a shameless nut shot. Iwao went tumbling off me with a groan of agony, and I rolled to my feet and disengaged, dodging back out of range.
Just as I had reoriented myself, I caught sight of Akihiko putting a decisive heel into Ichiei's face. I paused for a moment to admire my friend's unfailingly flawless taijutsu. His form was clean and straight-lined, positioned as always for perfect balance. His knee bent fluidly as his arms came up, and he posed himself perfectly to flip away or defend if someone tried to unroot him while his foot was in the air. Even though my hand-to-hand was better than my ninjutsu, I reflected, it was still nothing compared to his ability. It wasn't even just a matter of him knowing higher the tiers of Hurricane Gale—though of course he did—because his mastery shone through in his execution of even the most basic maneuvers.
My moment of appreciation was interrupted as Hayanari, who had also gotten to his feet and reoriented himself, charged at me with a yell. I quickly ducked under a swipe of his tantou and cuffed him in the back of the knee. His foundation crumpled, but as he was going down, he reached out, grabbed a fistful of my hair, and dragged me with him.
There was a moment of heart-stopping, sightless panic as I remembered Hatsuta's fingers on my scalp—saw his arm, felt his nails in my hair—before I wrenched my head free and smashed my fist into Hayanari's nose. He responded with an open-palmed strike to the chin, and we began rolling in the dirt, yanking at each other's shirt collars and trying to pull off elbow strikes between all the grabbing and kicking.
"Hayanari, their allies are coming!" Iwao suddenly yelled. "I think the diversion failed!"
Hayanari cursed and doubled down with renewed urgency. Suddenly I found our positions flipped, and then he was bearing down on me with his dagger, using his superior leverage drive through my block. I braced my arms against the onslaught, but was unable to force him back enough to lock them effectively. The blade of his tantou glanced off my forehead protector and sliced across my cheekbone, right below the eye. Hayanari went in for the finishing blow.
Then he stopped. I gasped and was subsequently open-mouthed when the gush of blood sprayed me in the face. Akihiko, blue eyes narrowed to a sharpened point, put the heel of his palm under his kunai's handle and shoved Hayanari off me with a grunt of exertion. Blood went spurting up into the air in a gory parody of a miniature fountain.
I immediately rolled over and spat until my mouth was empty and dry. Then I wiped a hand across my eyes and thought, dumbly, about transfusion-transmitted diseases, and about whether HBV was widespread in Earth Country.
"Thanks," I said breathlessly as Akihiko grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet, panting. He nodded, and we took a moment to stare at each other in winded silence; then we looked at Hayanari, who was lying on his side with a look of shock. Slowly, he lifted a hand to touch the hilt of the knife stuck in his neck.
"Hayanari!" The silence was broken when twin screams ripped from the throats of Ichiei and Iwao. They scrambled to their feet, Ichiei with his hands on his nose and Iwao with an uncomfortable hop in his gait. Akihiko and I leaped back in synchronization as they flew by, but they ignored us and went to their knees at their teammate's side.
"Hayanari!" Iwao gasped in terror, grabbing the boy's shoulders and pulling him into a sitting position. "Oh... oh. Oh my God."
"Wait! Stop!" Ichiei garbled through his hands. "There's neck damage! Don't move him!"
Hayanari lowered his arm and let out a little cough, blood bubbling up over his lip. Panicking, his teammates hovered over him, pulling on each other and babbling frightenedly and looking at his wound but not daring to touch the fatal blade still lodged within it. Unsure of what to do, Akihiko and I watched, mute and still, as they floundered.
Incognizant of all this, Hayanari's wandering eyes, which had been roaming the skyline confusedly, eventually found their way to us. His gaze seemed to focus, just for a moment, and Akihiko tensed up fantastically. But before either of them could say anything, Hayanari's sight glazed over, and his head fell slack against Iwao's chest.
Ichiei and Iwao ceased in their frenzy and fell silent. For a long moment, they knelt in the dust and stared at him, seeming not to comprehend. But then, eventually, they turned their heads.
"You…" Iwao uttered at us. He stood; support removed, Hayanari's body thudded lifelessly onto the ground.
"What?" Akihiko's response was hard, monosyllabic, and contained just the faintest echo of horror. His feet shifted, and his fingers twitched towards his holster as if to draw a new kunai. I found myself taking a step back.
Ichiei rose then, too, dropping his arms to reveal a bloody and most certainly broken nose. The air between us, silent and empty, slowly filled with the sounds of our comrades in distant battle. Muffled shouts and metallic clangs began to ring in our ears, growing ever closer.
As one, Iwao and Ichiei pulled in their elbows and yelled. Charging forward with inarticulate rage, kunai were drawn and bodies were braced for renewed battle. Biting my lip, I slid a foot back and brought up my arm, considering how to counter the next attack.
But the next attack never came. Before they had even really entered striking range, a pair of kunai went sailing over our heads and embedded themselves in our adversaries' faces, in an eye each and straight to the brain. Akihiko and I spun around so fast it was a wonder we didn't give ourselves whiplash.
Susumu was standing on a boulder behind us. He was even more blood spattered than he had been when we'd last seen him. As he lowered his arm and regarded the twitching bodies now appended to what was already an assuredly long list of kills, his lips twisted into a severe frown.
"They ought to have known better than to be blinded by anger, if they were made into chuunin at that age," he said as he eyed them critically.
Akihiko and I could only stare at him in dumbstruck silence, unable to reply. I could tell by the look on my friend's face that neither of us had sensed his presence. And that, I realized—even though we knew he was our ally—discomfited us both greatly. He had had a prime view of our unguarded, unseeing backsides, and if he had been of the mind to aim those kunai just a little lower, we would have been dead before we'd known it.
Susumu, though, took our silence with a different meaning, and looked sidelong at us. "I'm sorry to have interfered in your fight," he said, with enough sincerity for me realize with twisted fascination that he might have truly meant it—that he was truly sorry he hadn't given us the chance to finish them off ourselves. "But we don't have a lot of time. We need to rejoin the others before we get flanked. We're easy pickings as we are now."
Akihiko struggled to find his voice. "I—We—" he stammered, glancing back to the bodies, looking up at Susumu, and then glancing back again. "That's… that's okay," he finished weakly, finally returning his eyes to Susumu in all his bloody glory.
If I was worried over a bit of gore in my mouth, I had no idea what magnitude of concern would be appropriate for the state Susumu was in. He was positively drenched. I couldn't even imagine what sort of violence had transpired around him today. The only thing that could be certain was that it had been a bloodbath.
Either oblivious to or unaffected by our disgusted mesmerization, though, Susumu just turned and jerked his chin over his shoulder. The command to follow was clear. He sprang away without a single glance back; we were left to stand over the extinguished remains of the team from Iwagakure in silence, breathing heavy and shoulders still tight with interrupted anticipation.
The battle ended in a rout for the enemy shinobi. Their tactic, to seize the supplies and rescue their guides, had been to stage a backstabbing operation right before dawn. In theory, it had been a good plan; we were a much smaller force than them, so all they had needed to do overwhelm us to was position themselves well and attack from both sides.
Matters did not quite pan out as they had planned. Though it was clear that they had had a clever tactician among them—someone experienced in crafting military strategy, who might have even been a tactical officer—this particular squad of ANBU was exceptional, in both skill and determination. Oh, the Cloud shinobi had done as much as they could have—they had clearly put two and two together regarding our plainclothes agent, and special action had been taken specifically to separate Susumu from the rest of the group—but he was Special Operations and he had training and experience above and beyond that of even well-seasoned strategists. No one could have anticipated the sheer level of hypercompetence he and his team would bring to the field.
It was years and years later that I learned the man who called himself Susumu was a lieutenant of the First Division; that is, he was a captain handpicked by First Division head, who was the ANBU Commander himself. With that in consideration, perhaps it was not unexpected that their countermeasures had decimated the Cloud shinobi so completely. ANBU was the spearhead of the Special Forces, and they had been crafted specifically to neutralize threats exactly like these in exactly these sorts of circumstances. Alone in a foreign country, against incredible numeric odds, was precisely the sort of situation in which they thrived. The village must have been expecting they might be needed to diffuse a disaster situation such as this one.
"All right, all of you. I'm going to explain our plan of action," Susumu said lowly, faced away from the prying eyes and ears of the Cloud shinobi encamped nearby. All around us, the rest of the company was nonchalantly listening in, pretending to be engaged in cleaning their weapons, having conversations, or other activities. Susumu's hawk was silently circling overhead.
"Confirmation just came in from the rest of my squad: the enemy has allies on the outside. I suspected as much; it seemed unlikely that three young chuunin would be assigned to guide a contingent of Cloud shinobi through a hot zone like this one. In reality, the group you see here is actually only a small portion of a larger force under the command of one of Kumo's most high-profile ninjas, the son of the Third Raikage himself: A the Unruly."
There was a lull in the manufactured murmurs. Several people paused to look at Susumu over their shoulders.
Susumu continued. "The likely scenario is that the team from Iwa had been assigned to collapse part of the cliff in the initial attack, but failed to control their jutsu perfectly and ended up sweeping themselves, along with the men you see here, down to the valley floor. Now, this is lucky. When my team scouted ahead, they found that A's group has moved on. The shinobi you see here have been left for dead—or, at the very least, are expected to escape and catch up on their own. But while this is good in that it means we only have them to deal with, it's bad in that it indicates that A and his men are in a hurry, which can only mean that a renewed attack is imminent. Consequently, our mission has become that much more crucial. We must escape from here as quickly as possible, with as many supplies and as much manpower as possible."
Susumu went on to detail the likelihood of a nighttime sneak attack and what we were going to do about it. An agenda formed of blisteringly efficient resource management was laid out: he split our party into two groups, assigned them targets—specifically those who had comported themselves in leadership roles, one such being the Kumo jounin who had negotiated the truce with us—and instructed them to act as a strike team to confuse the enemy's chain of command. While our attackers were regrouping, he would use a flock of his animal summons to help our limited number of fighters harass and delay their organization. While this was going on, two of his squad mates would take the run down the cliffs to assist us, and with their arrival the battle would be won.
The execution was more flawless than could be believed. Even with the minor complication of being ambushed by a gank squad made up of no less than five jounin, Susumu was not prevented from escaping his attackers, rescuing Akihiko and me, joining up with his team, and crushing the remaining Cloud shinobi as thoroughly as an emptied aluminum can. Two brown-haired shinobi, one male and one female, dropped in on us from above, unleashed a cataclysmic amount of ninjutsu, teamed up with their squad leader to finish off the stragglers, and then returned to the main group in one sweeping display of unfathomable ability.
That was how the battle in Death Valley came to an end. It would be the last time I fought with Akihiko at my side for a long, long time.
When I saw him pensively sitting by the fire, mechanically wiping a cloth over his kunai, the need to apologize overwhelmed me. Quietly, I creeped up beside him and sat down. His faraway gaze did not so much as flicker toward me.
"Akihiko, I… I'm sorry."
Akihiko returned to the world with a startled blink and regarded me quizzically. "Sorry for what?"
"For… for the fight earlier," I mumbled as I stared down at my toes. They were dusty, and there was dirt under my nails. "For letting—letting Hayanari get me. Because… you had to…"
A strange look began to form in his eye. "Had to what?" he asked slowly.
"You know," I said, shrinking. "You had to… kill him."
I understood my mistake the moment the words left my lips. As Akihiko's face hollowed into a perfect avatar of pure dread, it occurred to me that he had not wanted to talk about it—that he had been trying not to face the reality of the matter before he had collected and prepared himself, and that I had sabotaged any attempt to go into the matter with a clear and steady step. I slowly brought a hand up to cover my mouth, but no matter how hard I wished for it in that moment, there was no way to take it back.
For a moment, he was utterly empty. He was so blank with unprocessed emotion that it seemed as though he might not move again for days. And then, after a nearly half a minute of that void stare, walls slammed up around his gaze so abruptly that I thought my head might spin.
"Why are you apologizing?" he asked coldly as he began polishing his kunai again. "It's not a big deal for a ninja to kill someone. I just did what I had to do. Or did you think I hadn't had it in me?"
"That's not what I meant," I said smally, fully feeling that I deserved to wilt under his gaze. "I didn't mean that at all. I… I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought it up. I just wanted to apologize for making you…"
"Well, don't," he snapped. "I don't need your pity. Maybe you would if you had killed someone, but I'm a shinobi. I can handle it."
My guilty thoughts stilled. The shinobi milling about glanced over their shoulders at us.
"Is that all you wanted to say?" Akihiko demanded, as if sensing their attention. "If that's it, I'm busy right now."
A beat passed. Then, not knowing what else to do, I stood. A flash of stinging regret zipped across Akihiko's face, but he quickly looked away, and he did not raise his head again until I had departed from his company.
My wanderings brought me to the opposite canyon wall, where the confrontation had taken place. Bodies were being stacked sky-high for the pyre. Even hours after the fight had ended, the dead were still being collected and dragged together. Perhaps it was taking so long because our manpower had lessened; a good chunk of people had gone to retrieve Haneda and his group, and another chunk had died in the altercation. Those shinobi, of course, were not going to go into the pyre; they were already properly sealed into scrolls and packed away for transport back to the village.
The adults were much too busy to pay any mind to a little girl running underfoot, so no one bothered with me when I arrived at the field of dead Cloud shinobi and began walking through their prone ranks. I did not quite know what I was looking for amongst the sea of stiff, gray faces until I found it, but eventually—after scanning over countless burnt, bled-out bodies—my eyes alighted on a trio of boys in uniforms that differed from all the others'.
The boys from Iwagakure.
I remember them very well even today. Hayanari Yamaguchi, Ichiei Arisato, and Iwao Yamasa: those had been their names. We had talked to them a bit, before the fight had begun. Hayanari had been twelve and the oldest, with chestnut-colored hair, gray eyes, and a wide mouth. Ichiei and Iwao had been the same age as us, ten, and cousins as well, with similar faces and matching almond eyes. None of them had been members of clans, but that probably wasn't unexpected. Konoha has always been considered exceptional in the diversity of clans it is home to.
Like us, they had been chuunin. They had been a semi-new team, formed from the previous year's batch of genin. Like us, their sensei has been nowhere in sight. Like us, they had been surviving the unending war. They had been like us right up until the moment they met us.
I put a hand on my cheek and looked at them. Then I squatted down and stared into Hayanari's face, trying to imagine what sort of thoughts had gone through Iwao's head when this same sight had met his eyes. Someone had removed the kunai already—there was no need to waste a good weapon—but the blood that had sprayed out from the wound was still dried up all over his chin and cheek.
It was a morbidly fascinating sight. It was my first time seeing such young person's corpse so close up; I hadn't had the courage to look this closely at Yoshiya's face after he'd died. I never imagined how empty the eyes would be. And they really were empty—empty of shock, of sadness, of anger, and of everything. There was only an unfillable void. They were not eyes so much as they were an expiring collection of cells and tissues that had become unable to transmit light to a functioning brain, soon to disintegrate and cease to be at all.
Had Hayanari been feeling any of those emotions before death had slackened his face? I replayed the moment we had met gazes with him in my head. Had he been shocked and hurt by our betrayal? Or had he perhaps expected it? Perhaps he had even planned to betray us first, and had only been putting up a front from the start, biding his time with pleasant chatter until he found the moment to strike. Was everything our seniors had said true after all? Would they really have killed us and run at the first opportunity?
"If we'd given you a chance, would you have left in peace?" I asked the corpse.
In my head, a string of logic answered me: No. Even if he'd actually liked us—and there was no way to know if he truly had—he would have been under orders from his superiors. If he'd disobeyed those orders and tried to spare us, or help us, he would have put both himself and his team at risk. Why would anyone do that? Why would anyone risk oneself and one's team for the enemy? His actions were proof enough. If Akihiko hadn't stepped in, I would be the one lying the ground where he was now. Even if our side had been the aggressors, there was no way he would have left us alone once the fight had begun. Their deaths had been sealed the moment they'd fallen into the valley. Their allies had abandoned them in hostile territory; that alone would have been cause enough for their perishing. In fact, if not for us and our supplies, they would have died even sooner. Both parties had known from the beginning that our little ceasefire had been no more than a farce. This was just the same as if we had met on the battlefield in open combat. It had been inevitable. They were ninja; they had known what they had been getting into...
Hayanari's frozen, unreplying visage continued to stare meaninglessly into the darkening sky. I wondered if this sort of logic did not rest at the heart of all cruelty.
"There you are. Come here."
Susumu stopped me just as I was returning to the camp. I blinked and actually froze where I was standing, so surprised was I to have him speak to me. After all, Akihiko had been the sole object of his interest since the beginning; he had never paid much attention to me.
"Um… yes?" I asked more than said when I had stirred myself enough to move to him. Susumu looked me up and down, crossed his arms, and then nodded to himself.
"All right," he said. "Before anything else, I want to ask that you, regardless of whatever answer you give me, keep this conversation and its contents to yourself. Will you do that?"
"I… I suppose if you need me to," I replied, bewildered. Before anything else? Before what?
Susumu cracked the slightest of smiles at my perplexion. Aside from expressions of irritation, of which there had been plenty, it was perhaps the most emotive face I'd had the pleasure of seeing him make. Naturally, it smoothened into businesslike professionalism before long. As if addressing a panel, he began, "With the promise of your secrecy, I would like to inform you that I have been operating and will be continuing to operate under cover for the duration of this mission. I am a shinobi of Konoha's Special Forces, and I am currently captaining the ANBU squad assigned to supervise this mission. Please do not disclose this information to any uninformed parties." Susumu took a breath, and then looked me dead in the eye. "I would like to extend to you the opportunity for a provisional apprenticeship in the Special Forces, under the guidance of an ANBU mentor. Do you hold any interest in such an opportunity?"
A/N: I'm not dead and it's not abandoned. The going has been rough is all.
Sorry for the doublepost to those who get notifications. I found a very glaring error. That's what I get for updating at four in the morning, haha. I just really didn't want to put it off anymore.
Thanks for sticking around to those of you who are still here. I appreciate your patience.
Cheers,
Eiruiel
