Unknown Losses
Ohh my goodness! I was priding myself in the fact that I actually proofread my two last chapters and then I read them again after they were posted and I found so many mistakes. (hides in corner ashamed…) I am so sorry people. I'll try to do better when doing that stuff. Anyways, hopefully this one will be more enjoyable than the last. Here it goes…
A/N # 1: I just replaced the first three chapters because I realized that if you have a really small monitor screen, then those dotted lines overlap on to a second line (which is really annoying).All I did was decrease the lenght of those dotted lines and centered them so depending on how large your screen is you will have a different sized dotted line. I know that was reeeaaalllyyy important lol. I hope nothing happened to the text whenI uplaoded these and i'm sorry ifI messed up the text somehow. Anyways, i'm done talking about that now.
A/N # 2: As you will see in this chapter, I do not do well at writing fight scenes. But! I have made drastic strides in writing them since the past.
Chapter 3: This is not the Way We Were Told it was going to be
Everyone was there. Naruto, Sakura, Neji, Ino, and Shino.
Sakura looked around. "Well, everyone is here. I assume everyone has everything they need?"
Naruto began to rummage through his bag. "Yep-"
Sakura placed the skin in between her thumb and index finger on her forehead and shook her head. "No- No Naruto. It was a rhetorical question."
"Great, I'm on a team with a girl with PMS right now." The blonde said, under his breath, of course.
"Nani?" Sakura snapped back at him. "What did you just say?"
"Nothing, I just was thinking about what I wonderful time I'm going to have with you on this mission."
Neji closed his white eyes and sighed. "Well, lets get back on track you guys."
The female blonde needed her memory to be refreshed. "So, what are we all doing again?"
Neji answered, "Well, me, you and Shino are going north through the Waterfall Country. Once at the Taki we will head west and sneak across the Earth Countries border and head to Iwa. Once there we will get information on the country to the north that has been acting differently lately."
"Me and Naruto are going west through the Rain Country. Once midway through the Rain Country we are going to head north through the borders of the Earth Country and head to Iwa from there." Sakura added. "Remember, it's closed borders for this mission because Tsunada-sama didn't ask Tsuchikage."
Naruto was growing impatient, but was successful in hiding it. "Okay, well, we all know what we are to do now. We should get going."
"Well," Neji got in his group. "We won't see each other until noon in about two days. Stay safe."
"You too." Naruto replied.
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"Tsunada-sama. They'll do fine. You have faith in them? Right?" Shizune asked.
As Tsunada placed her hand on her cheek, she tried to make herself and Shizune feel more at ease. "Yes. Over the years these kids have become exceedingly stronger. They've also matured quite a bit. I have faith in them."
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"We've made it this far in this short amount of time?" Ino questioned, in shock.
Shino looked at their surroundings. "Yes, it appears we have already reached the Waterfall Countries borders. At the pace we've been going, we can probably get to Taki before nightfall."
Neji nodded. "We'll stop at Taki once we reach it. The next day we will get to the border of the Earth Country and then we will take it slow once we've gotten past the border."
As they advanced through the Waterfall Countries hillside Shino grew weary. He started jumping closer to Neji so he could get in whispering distance of him. He was close enough now.
He whispered to Neji. "The wheat- as we've been jumping through it, it has moved and swayed with the wind we've created."
"Yes. What does this have to do with anything?" Neji narrowed his eyes and looked at Shino as they jumped.
"Look," Shino looked to the right of Ino. "Every once in a while, the wheat beside Ino moves, as if someone is there. I think someone is following us."
Neji saw the wheat move for a moment. "The next time it happens, I will confront the force."
Shino nodded and returned to his position in the middle of the three.
The wheat moved. Neji promptly threw a kunai at where the wheat moved.
"Wha!-" Ino shouted as she was knocked out.
"Move!" Neji jumped and grabbed Ino while Shino jumped out of the way. An exploding note attached to a needle (senbon) was sticking out of the ground, next to Ino's unconscious body.
Neji threw Ino on the ground beside Shino. Shino nodded as he immediately jumped in front of her (in an attempt to guard her).
A blow was sent at Neji. He blocked it. The white-eyed boy made the appropriate hand seals. "Byakugan!"
'Pathetic. Two hired mercenaries- and cheap ones at that. Who ever hired them was probably sold on the fact that they could make themselves invisible."
Two bodies lunged at Neji. As they both flew to the ground, after a hard hit from Neji, they became visible. Ino was just waking up.
She placed her hand on her head as she stood up. "What happened?"
Shino didn't turn around to look at her but answered. "We were attacked. Someone had been following us this whole time."
"Ohh."
Neji had one pinned on the ground- the other was knocked out. "Shino, Ino. Come look at these guys." They walked forward.
Ino furrowed her eyes. "So they attacked me? Well, they aren't from the Earth Country. That's for sure."
Neji had the fool face down in the dirt. He had his hands tied behind his back and he had one foot putting a painful amount of pressure on the man. "Where are you from? Who hired you?"
The man said nothing, but laughed. "A cold woman did. That's all you need to know."
"Why do you say that?" Neji smirked and put more pressure on the man.
He grunted from the pain. "Because you'll be dead in a moment."
Neji's eyes widened as the body disappeared beneath him. The man he presumed to be unconscious was gone as well. Because he still had his Byakugan active he saw four bodies approaching from a nearby forest, two were the men who had just disappeared from beneath him. Two headed for Ino, one for Neji and one to Shino.
Ino knocked two blows away from her. Her enemies became visible.
Shino knocked his enemy to the ground, making him visible. He sent a multitude of destruction bugs at his opponent. They were all burnt to a crisp as the man shouted. "Katon: Karyu Endan!" He then did the same to Shino, who barely evaded it.
"Being weak might have just been their mask." Neji shouted as he fought with his opponent. He saw one more enemy come from nowhere. "Ino! Shino! Run!"
The two responded by running the direction Neji ran. They came upon a fishing hut and a concrete dock beside a river. "We're running across!" They reached the dock and ran down its length, their enemies following shortly behind. Neji and Shino were first to jump off the dock and onto the water, a few feet below.
Shino and Neji looked up above them and stopped running over the water. In mid-air as Ino jumped onto the water, blood shot out of her back as two kunai hit her. Instead of landing on the water, she fell through the surface.
"No." Neji said with pain in his voice. He dove under the now reddish water and grabbed Ino.
Shino looked at Neji and the limp Ino in the hyuuga's arms. "We have to go back to Konoha now."
"Yes."
"This is not the way we were told it was going to be." Shino looked up as reflections in the water appeared.
Suddenly the five men were over their heads as the jumped off the dock. "We've got you now!" Shino fell before getting a chance to fight. Neji didn't fall with out a fight; but- his opponents overpowered him after a few intense moments of tai-jutsu fighting.
It all happened as the sun was setting. No one at Konoha had any idea of what had just happened to over half of the team sent to Iwa.
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"Sakura-chan, the sun is setting. We should be able to get to Ame before nightfall."
"Yeah." Sakura mused aloud. "I'm sure that the others are probably already at Taki by now."
After jumping through forests for a while, they came to Ame. It was raining and the sun had just set. Although it was cloudy, the moon shone through a few clouds, painting the land in blue. The streets were filled with water. There were few people out.
"Naruto?" The green-eyed girl asked.
"What?"
"I think we could make it to Iwa by early next morning. We could sleep in Iwa till 11:00 or so and still get some information by noon. We would also be there before the others. What do you think?"
Naruto looked at her, he didn't like the idea all that much because it was raining and he would have to stay up late. "Well, if you let me sleep till 11:00 then I guess we could do it."
"Great."
The two jumped out of the city and jumped through the forests of the Rain Country and the fields of the Earth Country. They reached Iwa at 3:00 in the morning, allowing eight hours of sleep and a stealthy entrance to Iwa. Naruto and Sakura got a suitable hotel room together. After drying off they slept separately; (to Naruto's disappointment) Naruto, the couch- Sakura, the bed. The green-eyed girl drifted off into her depressing dream once more.
As a tear met the blondes' cheek; the spikes halted in their assault across the platform. The room was silent. Two guards came in the hall and placed their javelins in front of the blonde girl and the bald man. The bald man seemed just as shocked as the girl. They hadn't expected anything to go wrong. But now… now it was over. They had failed. Their comrade must have been found out. The girls face turned from shock to a mixture anger and misery.
She screamed a furious scream. She pushed through the guard and ran down the hall. She ran for what seemed to be an eternity to her bald comrade. She reached the platform stairs. She raced up them. As she ran towards the queen, ready to avenge her loved one, she formed two clear swords in each hand. As she met the cold queen at the top of the stairs she crossed the swords, about to strike.
"How could you?" She screamed one last angry scream as her swords almost reached her target.
The bald mans heart raced as he held in a gasp. A white light shone for a moment. The two swords hit the ground and shattered. The blonde haired girl flew, in slow motion, through the air. She fell from the air, hitting the middle of the stairs, rolling down their length, and came to a halt at the bottom. Angelic blonde hair cascaded down her face. Her gray eyes were glassy and half-lidded. A pool of blood formed around the lifeless, broken body.
Well, I enjoyed that chapter. Anyways, I'm going to start posting now. You'll have to wait for the next chapter b/c I don't have it written yet. Let me warn you before you go on reading the rest of this fic. I am most definitely not the best at sentence structure- nor do I have any grammar skills. I also lack in punctuation. (cries) So I will apologize in advance if there are any really grammatically correct people reading my fics. I've decided to give up on that line right above this paragraph. I never can get it to work properly.
OMG! I cannot wait to write the next couple of chapters. lol They are going to be moving along faster and there is a whole new twist thing or something like that. Anyways, R&R please.
Next Chapter: It Wasn't You?
"The country is known as the Ice Country due to the climate that makes the earth and stone a tundra. The coast it has to the north is just a frozen bay in the winter, but for a single month each year during the summer, it melts, allowing traffic to come in and out of a small harbor." Iaru was still placing gems into the display glass. He spoke to Naruto, trying to look unsuspicious.
"I assume the country isn't associated with shinobi? They don't have their own, so they hire from you guys, the closest ninja country around them." (this is different from the actual fourth chapter)