Starting to go nuts from staring at this site's damn word processor for hours at a time when I'm not working. I think the action will pick back up next chapter, but have some devastation to tide you over in the meantime.
Let's get this trainwreck moving.
"You don't think I could have chosen a more subtle way of entering the village, do you?" Yuurei had a cynical grin on his face, looking at the hole in the wall that he'd carved through. Together with his female companions, he stood on the edge of Takigakure's primary munincipality, and his relaxed nature betrayed the fact that he didn't feel the need to act threatened by anyone inside of the city.
"No, not at all," Yugito said sarcastically.
"Of course not. What were we going to do, use the front door?" Tayuya asked, equally as serious as her teammates.
"Well, sure, if you want to be stopped at knifepoint and forced through customs. Smaller villages don't have the manpower to afford the luxury of letting anybody in." Yugito's explanation was for Yuurei's benefit; the red-eyed demon had grown up in Konoha for sixteen years before he left his village for the first time, and he wasn't as aware of the outside world's goings-on as the two women that traveled with him. Practical experience was the best teacher, in Yuurei's estimation, but having people to explain the finer details was certainly helpful.
Now, the only question was whether Takigakure had a sealing array around the rock walls that hid their village from the outside world; if they did, then ninja would come to their position to discover the nature of the disturbance. If not, then Yuurei wasn't opposed to the idea of finding the Nanabi Jinchuriki and attempting to conscript her help. While the existence of the Nanabi elevated this village to the top of the food chain among the Elemental Nations' minor villages, they had neither the soldiers nor the resources to truly compete with greater forces. Smiling as he felt nobody coming to check on the commotion he'd made, Yuurei set to work hunting for the Nanabi Jinchuriki's trail.
"I found her," Yugito said triumphantly. "There's a mushroom forest, up a plateau, on the other side of the village. She's inside it."
Yuurei cast a sidelong glance toward the Nibi Jinchuriki, wondering to himself whether the Nekomata's more animalistic sensory traits had rubbed off on Yugito. Putting a stop to his rather overt method of feeling the world around him, he gestured for Yugito to lead the way. Tayuya flanked her demonic master, but as she looked ahead, the steel glint of Yugito's hitai-ate came into her eyes. The offending headpiece had been moved to her waist, with the metal plate showcasing her allegiance pointing behind the ponytail-touting blonde.
"That was her way of hiding her identity?" Tayuya whispered to Yuurei, incredulous. "I mean, sure, it's not on her face now, but...for fuck's sake, it's like she's trying to get you to stare at her ass. It's almost as bad as the girls who wear it around their necks so you look at their tits."
Yuurei could only shrug. He wasn't sure, for his part, whether Yugito was trying to mess with him. If she was, it wasn't working; that meant she'd move on to bigger and flashier methods of grabbing his attention. Though the Nibi Jinchuriki could hardly be considered someone who wanted to live in the limelight, she seemed to enjoy pushing Yuurei to the limits of what he could handle. Briefly recalling the kiss they'd shared after he'd ingrained part of the slavery seal into her brain, the blond demon wondered if that had anything to do with the mild change in their relationship.
"You know I can hear you, right?" Yugito didn't look back at her companions, but she rolled her eyes; Tayuya was one of Orochimaru's strongest soldiers, personally answering to him and privy to information that others in the Elemental Nations had no way of knowing. The redhead had to know that Yugito would hear those words. It begged the question: did Tayuya really think she was doing this to draw Yuurei's attention? It was just a convenient way to quietly hide her nationality. What sort of enemy would walk past her and turn around without already being in the middle of a battle?
"My point stands," Tayuya said.
Yuurei moved the women's conversation out of his mind, splitting his focus between moving and lapsing back into the memories stored inside of his Sharingan. Kakashi had been inside of Takigakure twice before, in his days as a member of Konoha's Anbu corps, and he'd gone to the effort to view a map of the city. With that map at the forefront of his mind, Yuurei sped up. Tayuya looked at him quizzically, and Yugito was slightly taken aback by the speed he was starting to display; Yuurei was the type to walk leisurely, almost inviting danger to come to him. For him to move with any sense of urgency, a battle typically needed to be around the corner. And yet, he'd neither drawn his sandworm teeth, nor circulated his chakra beyond what was necessary to move quickly.
Keeping up with Yuurei wasn't particularly difficult for the two female Jounin, but they were still on alert thanks to his actions. When he shifted directions after every so many streets, seeming to supernaturally avoid a pursuer that neither of them could sense, that sense of alarm only grew stronger. Two minutes later, the edge of the city gave way to a forest of towering mushrooms. Though the demonic aura the Biju emanated was very faint, even Tayuya—a regular human, without a demon like the Nibi to sharpen her awareness—could feel its presence.
"Far be it from me to say this," Yuurei said with a sly grin, "but we're not here to kill."
Yugito and Tayuya looked at one another, indignation and incredulity in their eyes. Really? The demon who was oath-bound to slaughter an entire village was going to preemptively warn them not to kill people?
"You have some nerve, asshole." Tayuya glared derogatorily at Yuurei; just because she was bound to him, after all, didn't mean she had to love or respect him—similarly, Temari didn't have particularly strong feelings for the blond, but she'd still signed away her soul and her future. Truthfully, the redhead couldn't find fault with the decision. Ninja rarely married for love, and a walking death threat like Yuurei was as good a choice as any suitor. Still...he was more than just rough around the edges. With the dead gods as her witness, Tayuya thought, she'd need to grind him into shape before she considered giving Yuurei a longer tenure than the one she'd agreed to.
"He does," a new voice said, coming out to them from the inside of the mushroom forest. A moment later, a short woman with a deep tan walked out from the darkness; though none of the three invasive ninja had an available description for the Nanabi Jinchuriki, her segmented red eyes were as close to a dead giveaway as there would ever be. Though her color was even lighter than Yugito and Yuurei's natural right eyes, the shade of ripe watermelon was unmistakably red.
Yuurei didn't bother attempting to conceal his Sharingan, cutting an imposing figure as he tossed a scroll to the smaller woman. It was the mission statement given to the rogue Taki-nin that Yuurei had killed, detailing how and when she was to be captured and brought back to Kirigakure; as the mint-haired Jinchuriki read over it, her eyes widened, looking at the three ninja across from her with suspicion before relaxing slightly. Her demon, it seemed, had laid the situation out for her.
"Why did you show me this?" She bluntly asked.
"Why not?" Yuurei countered. "If someone was after me, I would want to know."
That same statement seemed to give Yuurei a moment of thought as he looked back at Tayuya, a question evident on his face; though Orochimaru's network of spies and informants was suitably vast, it still concerned him that the White Snake had seemed to effortlessly know his location.
"Yeah, I told him where we're headed. Thought a little bit of backup might not be a bad idea." The redhead confirmed, referring to Orochimaru. Tayuya had, in fact, requested that the yet-to-be-christened Five Fangs of the Snake be gathered in Kirigakure. Yuurei shrugged one shoulder in acknowledgement, neither grateful nor disapproving of the idea.
"We're on our way there to fight," Yuurei continued, looking back to the Nanabi Jinchuriki. "I thought I'd offer you a chance to come with us, since Taki wasn't too far out of the way."
"Really?" She asked, clearly still somewhat apprehensive.
"No ulterior motive. If you really don't want to join us, we'll leave without you. But..." Yuurei trailed off, with no intention to continue speaking—this woman seemed to be quite easy to read, emotionally. She was considering the offer.
"Just because we ran into a hit squad doesn't mean it was the only one, or the strongest." Tayuya attempted to sway the small woman's decision,
"Choumei says I can trust you, so I will. My name is Fu," Fu said, red eyes seeming to stare holes through Yuurei's face. After he and his compatriots introduced themselves to her, Fu seemed to brighten up considerably. "I think...I'll go with you!"
"Then we need to hurry, because I don't think the hole we dug will stay unnoticed for too much longer." Yugito spoke with a sense of urgency, looking behind the group of four as though she expected pursuers to show up at any moment. She wasn't wrong to do so—it was highly likely that their window for an unnoticed escape was already gone.
"Hey, Fu, how much do you care about Taki?" Yuurei asked his leading question, causing Yugito to cover her wide-eyed face with her hands as Tayuya scrunched her eyes up tight. They knew painfully well where this was going.
"Not very. They talk a lot about protecting me, but it feels more like they want to control my life. If I loved it that much, why would I want to come with you?" Fu answered, pretending not to notice Tayuya beginning to swear under her breath.
Retrieving a piece of paper, ink, and a brush from the storage seal in his back pocket, Yuurei hastily scribbled the margins for a seal before inscribing a single sigil in the middle. He seemed to focus on the cavernous walls that contained the hidden village, only to leap and plant the seal at a particular spot on the ceiling.
"Hope there's no animals up there..." The demon said with a self-satisfied look on his face.
Chakra pulsed at the snap of his fingers, and all three women felt their sense of hearing disappear as the ceiling trembled. Over the next several seconds, Takigakure vanished beneath several tons of stone; A deluge of water began to pour down from the surface of the world, sure to drown any survivors who lacked the strength to free themselves. Fu couldn't bring herself to blink; the village she'd spent her entire life in, save for a handful of missions that took her to the surface, had been annihilated in less than ten seconds. Countless streams of light flowed towards Yuurei, each individual set of small wisps indicative of a life he'd just taken. How many could it have been—a thousand? Five thousand? More? Even Yuurei himself wasn't sure.
Yugito smacked her forehead in aggravation as Tayuya continued to swear, and Fu couldn't find it in her to fault their reactions—she couldn't tear her eyes away from the devastation Yuurei had caused with a single explosive seal. From the plateau they stood on, at the edge of the giant mushroom forest, she watched river water divert into this graveyard of natural and artificial rubble. Every few seconds, another thin string of light would creep out from the flooding pit as another person died. Eventually, no more wisps came toward Yuurei; it was around this time that Yugito, Tayuya and Fu regained their hearing.
"What the fuck?" Tayuya's rhetorical question fell flat as Yuurei gestured toward the sky above their heads.
"We don't have to sneak out now," he said.
Yugito wanted to scream that they could have just made another tunnel, or briefly fought against a squad or two of interlopers, but she couldn't find the words. Her bloodshot and blood-red left eye seemed to take in the scenery with a demand for detail, only for a premonition to overcome her senses: this vision of death and devastation was the fate that awaited Kumogakure. Yuurei had killed her cousins, he would kill the rest of her family, he would kill her comrades, and he would kill everyone else she'd come to know in her twenty-six years of living in Kumo. All of that, for the sake of satisfying Temari's grieving desire for vengeance. And looking at his face, he didn't even seem to enjoy the destruction he caused—as if it wasn't impressive enough, or too simply executed, or his impassioned carnage was some unpleasant chore to get through with.
"Let's just go," Tayuya said at long last.
To the dwindling sound of water continuing to pour into the cavernous crater, the group of four left Takigakure's ruins behind in search of the fastest route to Mizu no Kuni's islands.
"Do you really believe he'll come here at some point, Zabuza? Even if he were to survive the destruction of Nami no Kuni, I'd think we would have heard something. Especially after our failures in assaulting Konoha and Suna."
The man speaking was Yagura, the Yondaime Mizukage. In his office stood the last living members of this generation's Seven Swordsmen: Momochi Zabuza and Hoshigaki Kisame. Also in the room were a pair of oinin that served as his personal guard, whose efforts had thwarted no less than seven assassination attempts by those who'd rebelled against him. Both of them had a Doujutsu in their right eye—one Sharingan, and one Byakugan. Which one was which would be known only to themselves, however, as their identical robes, masks, and gloves covered their entire bodies.
"I do," Zabuza said, "and I think he's the reason those invasions failed."
Kisame looked at his onetime teammate with some slight derision; though he'd learned over the years to respect Zabuza's strength and cunning, the man's academic deductive skills sometimes left a bit to be desired. From the age of six, he'd been killing his way from one battlefield to the next—book learning wasn't necessary when you were a highly-capable murderer.
"No, hear me out." Zabuza saw the look his ex-teammate was giving him, "He's from Konoha, so he goes there and kills his way through the invasion force, taking out most of them without bothering to really finish the job, because he thinks Konoha's other ninja can rout their weakened enemies. Once he finds out about the details, he heads to Suna, because he's a demon and he wants to go where the battlefield is. But he decides to make it a showcase, and he kills every last one of the attackers. So, when he gets wind of the fact that this damn country is in the middle of a civil war..."
"As unrealistic as I think that is, I guess you have a point," Kisame said with a nod in Zabuza's direction. He understood the leaner man's unwillingness to believe that his enemy had died—if you didn't make absolutely sure they were dead, then your only recourse was to believe they were still alive.
"And what do you suggest I do about him, when he arrives?" Yagura asked plainly. If a true-born demon were to arrive in Kirigakure, even if he was eventually killed, the losses he suffered would be catastrophic.
"Honestly, it might take you and Utakata combined to bring him down, but...leave him to me. That brat and I have a score to settle." Though nobody could see it, Zabuza was grinning beneath his armor-tape mask, and the blade on his back seemed to thrum with excitement at the idea of battling the young Kyuubi again. The handfuls of soldiers who'd returned from Konoha in defeat had, among other things, occasionally recounted a one-eyed blond—there was little doubt in the swordsman's mind that it was the demon from Nami no Kuni.
"I'll trust your faith in your abilities, then, Zabuza. You haven't failed me yet." Yagura idly drummed two fingers on the surface of his desk, seemingly lost in thought. "Kisame, your report?"
"We're driving the rebellion's southern forces back, and keeping them corralled. In another three months, we'll have driven them into the ravines, and then it'll be like stabbing fish in a barrel."
"Excellent," Yagura nodded agreeably.
"Will that be all, sir?" Kisame asked. Though showing rudeness was the last thing he wanted to do to the one man who could convincingly defeat him, Kisame's eagerness to return to the battlefield was clear.
"It will. Both of you may return to your posts," Yagura said.
"Then until we meet again, Lord Mizukage, Mist Guard, Rain Guard." Zabuza bowed his head as Kisame saluted, only for both men to vanish in puffs of smoke in the next instant. Though the pair of Kenjutsu masters were traveling further and further outside of their sensory range, the Mizukage's guards didn't let their vigilance falter; if anything, they now seemed even more alert than before. They couldn't afford to be lax in their duties—in Chigiri no Sato, the least disastrous outcome from that sort of dereliction was getting yourself killed.
