Sute breathed through her nose as she pressed her back against the boulder, her hands lifted into a still seal and her eyes close. Around her the world felt still, the only sound the soft whistle of wind carving its path through the gaps in the rocky terrain. A barely audible crunch of gravel sounded from the left, and she cocked her head to the side, funneling chakra to her light. Footsteps so light they were almost inaudible, slowly padding across the ground.
Exhaling quietly, she began to cycle through hand seals, her pace slow and leisurely as she continued to listen to the footsteps. They moved slowly, circling around the larger rocks and sparse vegetation that littered her mental map of the area and taking care to avoid making too much noise. Her hands formed the final seal, her fingers pressed together in the ram seal, and the corner of her mouth quirked into a smirk.
Shruuunk!
"SHIT!" A loud curse echoed through the silence as the earth split apart, stone walls springing from the gaps to form a tight dome. Sute flipped into the air and flashed through more hand seals as she turned over to study the dome, watching the walls converge upon the startled Mist ninja. Flashing through his own seals, sparks began flickering around his hands, the man releasing a loud roar as he jabbed a knife-like hand at the nearest wall.
In elemental rock-paper-scissors, lightning beat earth. Lightning could travel through earth and break it apart—more specifically, the intense heat and energy could warp stone on an atomic level, making it temporarily more fragile and thus more susceptible to fracturing. When one added chakra to the mix, that usually meant that doton jutsu would crumble or fall apart beneath a suitably powerful raiton technique.
Which was perfectly fine by Sute.
The second his fingers made contact with the wall the rock rippled and softened, turning to mud. Confusion flickered across the man's face before swiftly morphing to horror as the mud slid downwards to reveal a barrier wall made of pure chakra, a paper tag hovering in the center.
Sute's smirk grew, cheeks puffing up as she finished her own hand seals. Water spewed from her mouth and shot through the gaps in the stone to directly strike him in the face. The sudden blast knocked him off balance, and that was all the time the barrier walls needed to finish merging, slamming into him from four sides to trap him in a pyramid-shaped barrier.
Even as she landed Zabuza and Heki materialized around the imprisoned man, the latter slapping a paper tag at the barrier. The chakra walls rippled around Heki's hand as it passed through, slamming the tag against the back of the prisoner's head. The prisoner shouted in alarm but then froze as the writing on the tags lit up, and his eyes rolled in the back of his head before he slumped forward unconscious.
"Well, that was anticlimactic," Heki commented dryly.
"Tell me about it," Zabuza grumbled, crossing his arms with a scowl. "And here I thought we'd finally get some action for once. That other guy we caught barely put up a fight."
"Don't complain. At least we can go home early and skip the hospital checkup."
"Yeah, great," Zabuza grumbled, crossing his arms. "And then we can go right back to patrol duty tomorrow. Dammit, I was hoping for some actual action for once after the whole Cloud ninja thing."
"Then why did you hang back?" Sute asked, her voice saccharine sweet as she strode over to them. "I mean, you didn't have to sit back and wait for me to do all the work. You could have come in any time swinging that tiny katana of yours." Zabuza snorted, rolling his eyes in disdain.
"Yeah, right. We're the ones who had to actively patrol the area and actually fight. All you had to do was just plant traps and wait."
"Yes, an entire hour of standing around waiting," Sute drawled sarcastically. "Doing absolutely nothing. How exciting."
"Do I need to report you two for bickering?" Heki cut in impatiently, instantly silencing the two teenagers. When it became clear they wouldn't argue, he gave a satisfied nod. "Thought so. Ringo, what are the seals to release the barrier?"
"Just boar and ram," she responded with a shrug. "For the record, this seal is still really experimental. Don't expect those hand seals to work on future variations. When it's done, I'm going to have it set up to require people's chakra to be specifically keyed into them to activate them."
"Good to know." He flashed through the two seals she mentioned, the chakra barrier soon dissipating and the four tags fluttering to the ground. Sute snatched them with a single swipe of her hand and slipped them in the pouch on her hip, while Heki hefted their unconscious prisoner over his shoulder. "Alright, let's head back and drop this guy off at T&I. We'll probably have to report to the Mizukage, too."
The two teenagers just grunted as they followed, Zabuza still looking mildly irritated while Sute grimaced. "Do we have to see him?" she asked.
"We found a group of deserters who managed to bypass Kiri's borders with a scroll containing sensitive information," Zabuza retorted, gesturing to the pouch on Heki's hip undoubtedly containing the scroll in question. "He'll probably want to hear about this in person."
"Great," Sute grumbled under her breath, grimacing. It wasn't like she disliked the Third Mizukage, per se, but... well, talking to him always left her on edge for some reason. She'd rather not interact with him more than strictly necessary.
Which might be a problem since she needed to talk to him if she wanted a mission in the field. Right now, most of her skills could be classed as support. While she'd finally developed the appropriate muscle mass needed for her preferred fighting style, she still needed more actual experience with it. Not many people besides Utakata were willing to fight her more than once, and he was becoming too familiar with her styles to be a really good test subject anymore. Sute needed some more field experience, and soon.
She sighed loudly, drawing Zabuza's attention. "What's on your mind this time?" he asked.
"Just a bit stir-crazy, I guess," she responded with a lazy shrug. "Most of my work has been in-village lately. Don't get me wrong, I love the hospital and all, but—actually, no, that's a lie," she corrected herself with a sour scowl. "The hospital is a freaking mess and I am the only person there who knows how they're actually supposed to operate. I swear, some of the trainees don't even know how to take care of bedpans and catheters."
Her nose wrinkled in disgust, sticking out her tongue as she shuddered. She'd hoped she had finished with a majority of that stuff back when she graduated med school, as hospitals usually had nurses or students around to handle those tasks. But nope, here the useless peons she had available couldn't even handle that. Hell, one of them even had the nerve to throw up after cleaning bedpans!
Bloody Mist was a total misnomer. The hospital was full of wimps.
"Well, good news is you're probably good to follow this guy into T&I," their other team member interjected. "You can take out your stress on him, and then ask Mizukage-sama for a field mission."
"Eh, I think I'll ask for some time off instead," she mused. "I kinda want to focus on my own stuff for a while, maybe go on a trip."
"You mean a vacation?" Zabuza actually snorted at that. "Good luck with that."
"Not a vacation, a research trip," Sute retorted testily. "I've got some stuff I want to look into, and I've sucked Kiri's libraries dry."
"Even if it's beneficial, don't get your hopes up," Heki cautioned her. "At the very least don't expect to be allowed to go alone. Tensions are getting pretty tight lately, we're probably headed for another civil war." The two teenagers grimaced at that, growing appropriately somber. Both of them knew civil war was likely in the very near future, but it was another thing to actually hear it said out loud.
"Yeah, screw it, I'm asking for a mission," Zabuza declared dryly. "I want to get the hell away from this clusterfuck of a village." The others just grunted, not particularly disagreeing with him. Village pride had never been particularly strong in Kiri, but right now Sute was almost ready to start counting the days to her imminent defection.
Sute suppressed a sigh as she sat in the lobby of the Mizukage's office, tapping her foot in a silent rhythm to try to ease her nerves. Right now Heki was meeting with him about the deserter they'd caught, as well as the other two he and Zabuza had killed. Neither of the teenagers had been informed of what the scroll contained, but in the end it didn't matter. As long as she didn't have to meet with the Mizukage, she didn't particularly care.
At fourteen, Sute had entered Year Three of her self-made timeline of canon. Her skills had advanced a great deal during the past few years, especially in terms of her iryo-ninjutsu, poisons and fuinjutsu. Her poisons and seals had become pretty standard among the ANBU in particular, just basic barrier seals for defense and fast-acting paralytics. At this point she'd suitably established herself as a supporting pillar of Kiri.
And yet, she was still either stuck in the hospital or on patrol duty.
This time she didn't bother suppressing her sigh, allowing herself to sink into the chair. Zabuza, who was sitting next to her, obviously noticed her change. "What's wrong, bored?" he grunted.
"Just thinking about patrol," she grumbled. Patrol had to be one of the more boring jobs available to Mist ninja. Since the war's end a lot of people had been rather unhappy, and given the long history of civil war that haunted the Land of Water the village had seen fit to step up their patrol. Thanks to her foreknowledge, Sute knew that Kiri was right to be worried (see: the Kaguya clan, just... the Kaguya), but that didn't make most of the patrols any less boring. Not much actually happened on them.
"Would you prefer to work another seventy-two hour shift in the hospital?" Zabuza asked.
Sute paused. "...I'll need to think on that," she replied honestly. "They're both annoying and frustrating, and we just got a batch of trainees which makes it even worse than usual."
"Tch. If you say so." Zabuza rolled his eyes and let the conversation end there. The two fell into a brief but not unfriendly silence, each lost in their own thoughts. The two definitely couldn't be called friends, but then, Kiri wasn't known for encouraging strong bonds and friendships among its forces.
Frankly, at this point Sute considered it a bizarre miracle she'd hit it off with anyone. While being picked up by Kiri had its own set of problems, she had to admit she probably wouldn't have fit in as well in super-friendly and open Konoha, or power-hungry and highly-structured Iwa. Her previous life had left her just a bit too off to fit in with most places, and she enjoyed the general freedom Kiri provided.
Plus, she actually knew some stuff about Kiri. Her gaze slid over to Zabuza, a small smirk playing on her lips. "So, Zabun," she said, enjoying his small twitch at the nickname, "have you run into any cute little orphans lately?"
His sour look said it all. "What is with you and bringing up orphans all the time?" he snapped impatiently. "Do I look like the kind of person who'd get along with kids?" Sute opened her mouth to respond with a cheeky remark, but at that moment the door opened and both teenagers instantly straightened in their seats, turning to the door attentively. Heki stepped out with a casual saunter, a young boy with light-colored hair and purple eyes appearing behind him briefly.
Karatachi Yagura had to be some kind of record setter. Sute didn't know his age off the top of her head, but he was definitely younger than her right now, and he'd already reached jounin and become the favored candidate for the Mizukage's successor. Sute felt her own accomplishments to be kind of underwhelming compared to the blond boy, but then again he was the jinchuuriki for the Sanbi.
Even now, looking at the deceptively small boy, Sute couldn't help but remember his sealing just a year prior. As Harusame's apprentice in fuinjutsu, Sute had been present for the ritual with the expectations that she would learn to maintain and administer the seals after her teacher's inevitable demise. While she had seen Utakata's seal a few times and studied the process in theory, actually seeing it in action was a different thing altogether.
It probably would have been more shocking if not for how eerily familiar the scene felt. Her mind kept flashing back to that unspoken night from the end of the Third War, huddled in a cave with her hands pressed against her ears as Rin screamed—
Nope. Not going to think about it.
"We trust you to handle this matter appropriately," Yagura said, drawing her back to the present. His purple eyes were blank and unreadable as ever as he faced Heki, his thoughts hidden, but the bald jounin just nodded.
"We will not disappoint you, Yagura-sama," he vowed, and the young-looking boy nodded before closing his door. Heki exhaled through his nose as he turned to the teens, nodding at them. "We're done for the day. I'm going to drop off the scroll back at the archives. We'll meet up at the gates tomorrow, same time."
"Fucking finally," Zabuza grunted, rising to his feet impatiently. "I'm going to the training ground to find Juzo."
"Oh, so he came back from his mission alive?" Sute asked flatly, and Zabuza snorted, the bandages covering his mouth stretching as he smirked.
"Yeah, bastard came back yesterday. Fine by me, gives me a chance to take Kubikiribocho the classic way." Surprisingly, while he'd garnered his reputation as the "Demon of the Mist" Zabuza still had yet to actually become a Swordsman. Partially because Juzo was still alive and thus had Kubikiribocho, which suited Zabuza's fighting style best out of all the swords, but also because most of the unclaimed swords had gone missing after the war.
Funnily enough, Mangetsu had already inherited Hiramekarei though, which was hilarious in Sute's opinion since he was known as the "Second Coming of the Demon." She tactfully did not remark on this irony to the original Demon since she did want to have a somewhat cordial relationship in place for the time he eventually defected.
"Tell him I say congratulations," she deadpanned, and Zabuza snorted, knowing exactly how Juzo would receive that news.
"Yeah, yeah, I'll pass it on. Later." He nodded at her and headed off, and Heki snorted softly, grabbing Sute's attention.
"You're still teasing him about that?"
"I'm not teasing him, I'm congratulating him on his will to live," Sute informed him sweetly, though her eyes betrayed her amusement. The older man smirked, rolling his eyes.
"And here I thought you were just a stupid kid, but no, you're just crazy. See you tomorrow, Ringo." He patted her shoulder and strolled out, leaving Sute to follow at a sedate pace. Heki had been a member of her platoon during the war, though they never interacted. She only remembered him because he usually worked with Ao, who come to think of it she hadn't seen since before the war ended. Maybe she should seek him out sometime, he'd probably remember her.
Ah well. Catching up with old war buddies could wait until later, for now she just decided to take advantage of the early end to her patrol shift. She hummed as she strolled through the streets, her good mood persisting until she reached her destination. She rapped on the door three times and rocked on the balls of her feet as she waited, and soon enough it opened to reveal a certain emo-haired teenager.
"Sute?" Utakata looked only mildly surprised to see her, and she smiled.
"Hey Uta," she greeted brightly. "Have you seen shishou? I want him to review some stuff I've been working on."
"Not lately," Utakata replied with a small frown. "He's still busy." Her smile fell at that, slumping with a small sigh.
"Still?" she grumbled impatiently. "It's been two months. Dammit, how long is this going to take?"
"Who knows?" Utakata said, shrugging lightly. "You know how he gets when he's on a roll." Lately Harusame had been holing himself away to work on some secret, experimental project he wouldn't tell anyone about. It had been a good two weeks since Sute had last seen the man, and it had started to grate on her patience since she really wanted his input on some medical seals she'd made.
She sighed in disappointment, running a hand through her hair. "Oh well. Are you free tonight?"
"...You don't want to spar, do you?" Utakata instantly looked much more wary, almost grimacing at the prospect. He might be her go-to sparring partner, but that didn't mean he liked it.
"Nah, no sparring tonight," she assured him with a shrug. "Patrol duty ended early today, so I want to use tonight to unwind before having to go out."
"What would we even do, then?" Utakata relaxed marginally at the reassurance he wouldn't be spending the night in excruciating pain, though he still remained a bit on edge and wary of her.
Smart boy, she mused with a small smirk. Aloud she said, "I figured we'd grab an early dinner somewhere and then hang around the training grounds. Maybe stop by the Black Rabbit and listen to some stories while getting a drink, I hear the rakugo performer there is pretty good." Utakata frowned.
"That's... surprisingly mundane," he commented, and she shrugged.
"Can't always be training to be a fine-tuned killing machine," she responded idly. "Everyone needs hobbies, it keeps us sane." Rakugo was an unfamiliar concept to Sute—it was a traditional form of comedic storytelling that involved a single speaker portraying multiple characters—but she figured it was worth checking out, especially since she needed more leisurely activities to do with Utakata. Reading and gardening didn't exactly work as group activities.
Utakata seemed to consider it carefully, looking hesitant at the idea. Venturing into public settings rarely went well for him, people tended to react badly around their village's older jinchuuriki. Still, soon his features cleared and he nodded minutely. "Alright, I guess I don't have anything else to do tonight."
Sute brightened at his agreement, and he jumped as she snatched his wrist with an eager smile. "Great! Let's go!" She proceeded to drag him into town and he offered small noises of protest, barely managing to break free long enough to close and lock his door. Still, some of the tension seeped out of his posture and she could sense a degree of fond exasperation from her friend.
And if she noticed any particularly dark looks directed at them as she dragged him through the streets of Kiri, well, she'd just take care of them later. For now she focused on finding a decent seafood restaurant and actually relaxing for once.
Her second life had been full of nonstop working and plotting for the future so far, it felt good to take a break and enjoy a peaceful moment for once. She'd resigned herself to never being able to totally relax the moment she realized the universe she'd been reborn and where she ultimately ended up, but just for a few minutes, Sute could pretend things were fine.
Miles away from Kiri, Kakashi perched on a branch staring at the sea, his eyes narrowing behind his porcelain mask. ANBU missions usually involved assassinations or infiltration, but today's mission broke the usual pattern and served as nothing more than fancy surveillance. Nearby he could hear Genma shifting on his own branch, abandoning the usual professional demeanor required of ANBU to give a low whistle.
"Those whirlpools look pretty violent," he commented. "You knew Kushina better than anyone else here, did she ever give you any tips on how to get past them?"
"She mentioned a seal somewhere on the mainland that would respond to anyone with Uzushio blood," Kakashi replied. "Crane, can you see anything on the island?"
On a lower branch Crane, the sole female member of the small three-man expedition team, gave a small hum as she undoubtedly activated her Byakugan. "Status is unchanged from the previous visit. The chakra barrier is still active and shows no signs of being disrupted. Should we search for the seal on the mainland?"
"No," Kakashi decided. "Our objective is to ensure no one's penetrated the barrier."
"Well, mission accomplished, then," Genma huffed lightly. "At least the view's pretty. Sunset always looks nice, don'tcha think?"
"Mongoose, should I remind you I am married and have a daughter?" Crane responded dryly, and Genma made a choked noise before vehemently denying any insinuations that he'd been flirting. Kakashi ignored them, his Sharingan spinning beneath his mask as he studied the island across the violently churning waters. Buildings and pillars sat in piles of rubble along the shores of the glittering sea, the stone tinted orange and gold by the sunset.
The bi-annual visit to Uzushio always left him with mixed feelings, the remains of the village a sharp contrast to the colorful and lively stories Kushina used to regale his team with about her childhood. Sometimes he felt his teammates had been lucky to never see the shell of their former allied village, Kushina's descriptions of a living and vibrant Uzushio forever preserved in their memories. Under other circumstances he'd probably avoid it, wanting to preserve the images Kushina had given him, but as it stood he had a vested interest in checking on it.
He wondered how long it would be until the day he'd arrive to find the barrier gone, taken down not by an Uzumaki but by a green-eyed girl.
Welcome to Sute's teenage years! She is now 14 and deadlier than ever. Not much to say, this is pretty much a transition chapter. Got some lovely bits of foreshadowing. Also, Yagura's age is just... what even is it? I originally had him as the acting Mizukage, but decided against it last-second because it's over-emphasized in canon how young he looks (though we all know how Kishi draws way more mature-looking characters than their actual ages, so hard to be 100% sure), which gives me the impression he's probably younger than Sute. So, yeah. Mizukage's apprentice it is.
Next chapter has some more interesting stuff in it. Anyways, thanks for reading as always! I got some amazing reactions last time, and I really hope you guys continue to enjoy this story. Before I go, a question to assuage my curiosity: what animal do you think would be most fitting for Sute to make a summoning contract with? I'm not even sure if she'll have one, but I really can't think of a good fit for her. Best would probably be snakes, but, well... you know that's not an option.