WARNING: This chapter contains descriptions of gore and dead bodies. Reader discretion is advised.
Chapter 14
Zabuza hadn't been lying about Yagura pulling out any stops with assembling this particular team. Sute raised an eyebrow as they ran along the road, studying the two larger members of their team idly.
Just on their own, Kisame and Fuguki stood out from the crowd. Suikazan Fuguki was best described as a giant, towering above the already noticeably tall Kisame by nearly two feet for a grand height of eight feet. Combined with their unusual coloring, the two men cut very imposing figures. It made perfect sense that these two would be the ones to inherit the monstrous and sentient Samehada, easily the most terrifying sword of the Seven Swords.
The shorter of the pair (and wasn't it weird that Kisame could actually be called short for once?) turned his head slightly, his eyes flitting her way briefly before turning back forward. "What's with the staring?" he muttered.
"Just thinking how awesome it is to be on a mission with you, Shark-nii-san," Sute responded cheerfully, and Kisame winced at the old childhood nickname she'd given him while Zabuza loudly snorted in amusement. Once they turned their attention away her smile faded, her expression taking on a more thoughtful slant as she studied her largest teammate.
The presence of Suikazan Fuguki on this mission rang all sorts of alarm bells in her mind. As one of the four remaining Swordsmen, he held a rather lofty position in their ranks and did not get sent on missions needlessly. Not for the first time she wondered about the first team that had been sent out, because if the Mizukage felt the need to send out Fuguki then he must have good reason to believe their enemies were fairly powerful.
Sute was perfectly aware that she was the weakest member of this team. All the others had advanced to jounin well before this point, Zabuza the most recent one to reach the rank after getting promoted two years ago. Sute had yet to rise above her chuunin rank, and while she'd advanced her skills a fair amount she didn't delude herself in believing herself to be anything close to equal with Kisame or Fuguki. Her last evaluation had her combat skills classed at a high-level B-rank, though it had been a year.
With luck, this mission would change all of that.
She exhaled softly through her nose, pushing the thought away. They'd been moving since dawn, traveling for a steady five hours now, and would have another four hours of running before reaching their destination. Three, if they pushed themselves, but it would be best to pace themselves to avoid getting exhausted in case of fighting. Fuguki seemed to be thinking along the same lines, because he suddenly slowed and signaled for a break.
The group slid to a halt instantly, taking their time to amble to the trees to sit down and rest. Zabuza pulled out a water bottle from his bag and took eager chugs from it, while Kisame just reclined against a tree trunk lazily. He eyed Sute as she plopped down in front of the neighboring tree, shifting the knapsack off her back. She didn't really bother carrying a weapons pouch on her leg anymore, aside from an "emergency" kunai kept in a lightweight pouch on her hip.
Sute had taken her cues from Hunter-nin when selecting her mission outfit, choosing to wear roomy and billowy pants that ended just beneath her knees with a more closely fitted dark teal top. She still wore the standard shinobi sandals in black instead of sandals though, and the only "armor" she wore were dark blue wrist guards, though everything had naturally been reinforced with seals. Her fighting style still depended on fast and fluid movements above everything else. Any extra components like flak jackets or even leg warmers would only serve to weigh her down and potentially lower her effectiveness on the field.
Even her tiny knapsack reflected that mindset. Kisame made a loud choking noise when she opened it and pulled out a bokken more than twice the bag's length, even Zabuza startling and nearly dropping his bottle. "How the hell did you fit that in there!?" he demanded.
"This bag's pretty much a glorified storage scroll," Sute responded with a shrug. "I can fit as much in here as three standard packs." She'd conceived the idea of making a bag-based storage vessel from that giant book she'd formerly tugged across three countries. If a book could be used to store multiple objects—including other storage scrolls—then a bottomless bag seemed just as feasible.
Granted, actually making the damn thing had taken a lot of work and time. She'd destroyed no less than ten bags in her experimentations, losing numerous dummy kunai to the void where all items vanished when stowed in storage scrolls. It had taken her close to two years of on-and-off experimentations and closely working with Harusame to finally get it working, and it still wasn't exactly perfect.
She set aside the bokken and continued rummaging through the knapsack, pulling out a few more weapons and two bulky scrolls before finally holding up a water bottle. "I should've packed this last," she muttered as she unscrewed the lid to take a sip.
"Ringo, you should rearrange your bag's contents now if necessary," Fuguki said bluntly. He'd taken up perch closer to the path, sitting cross-legged against a thicker tree and staring down the road with keen eyes. "You can't afford to waste time rooting through that for weapons."
"I know, I know," she deflected with an easy shrug, chugging down some more water before shoving the bottle back inside.
"What are we looking at, anyway?" Zabuza questioned while she started packing everything back up. "The only thing I heard about them is that they seemed to be shinobi, nothing on why they might be foreign. Any chance they're just rogues?"
"It's possible, but unlikely," Fuguki responded. "The initial reports came from a restaurant owner who's intimately familiar with Mist ninja. He reported a group of five unfamiliar men entered his establishment and showed typical shinobi behaviors, and found it suspicious they wore no hitai-ate. A second report from a nearby village noted a similar group had been witnessed using chakra to cross a stream by a local child."
"So they got sloppy then," Sute summarized. "How long has the other team been gone?" If they were going to go over the mission anyway, she might as well gather all the information she could.
"Six days as of today," Fuguki grunted, and she hummed in thought. She knew the team's original destination had been in an area called Hirame-wan, a coastal region full of small fishing villages and most notable for being close to a road connecting Kiri to one of the major ports in the Land of Water. Sute had passed through the region once before, back during the war on her first deployment, so she knew that for shinobi speeds it would take at most a day to travel the distance.
The number of scenarios where the team would take six days to return were few. Even if they ran into trouble, it should take one, two days at most to handle the situation. Mist ninja didn't typically spend time on reconnaissance, they embodied the phrase "shoot now, ask questions later." If they had felt a need to observe the enemy for some reason, they would have sent a report back to Kiri to alert the village.
"How many people were on it?" she asked.
"It was a five-man unit."
"So basically, we're looking at a potential minimum of four people in critical condition or otherwise unable to move," Kisame interjected lazily, and Sute nodded in mute agreement. The only scenario that explained the team's delay would be a battle going south and wiping out the brigade. If even two people had been able to move, they would have sent one to Kiri to retrieve back-up and leave the other to tend to the other survivors or fend off the invaders.
Best case scenario, they'd find one of their agents crawling along the road towards Kiri to report on four people in critical condition and all hostiles dead.
More likely, there wouldn't be anyone left alive.
Two hours later, the suspicion seemed to be confirmed when they stumbled across the corpse of a Mist ninja sprawled in the middle of the road, a trail of blood behind him and arms stretched out front in a position that indicated he'd been crawling. Sute took lead right away, darting forward to turn the man over. The skin felt cold, the body resisting movement as she flopped it over, and she gripped the jaw and met less resistance.
"Rigor mortis is already starting to fade," she reported, moving on to his hands. Tugging on the fingers one joint at a time, she mentally reviewed all the other factors—environment, subject's age and physical condition, strenuous exercise from crawling—and declared, "I'd estimate his time of death of to be about ten to fourteen hours ago."
"Any notable wounds?" Zabuza asked, crouching next to her to inspect the body. She pulled the kunai from the emergency pouch on her hip and used it to slice through his jacket above a particularly large bloody gash, pulling it apart to expose his pallid torso. All of them paused to stare at it.
"Are those his intestines," Kisame asked flatly.
"Not gonna lie, I'm impressed he managed to move that long without them spilling out," Sute hummed, idly poking at the off-color internal organs with the tip of her kunai.
"You know if he's the scout, the others are probably dead," Zabuza commented blandly.
"Oh, definitely," she agreed blithely, getting up and turning to face Fuguki. "Do you want me to do a full autopsy?"
"No, there's no point in it." His gaze drifted upwards to the sky, his already beady eyes narrowing further as he studied the dark clouds beginning to gather in the distance. "There's a storm moving our way. If we move now, we should be able to follow the blood trail before it gets washed away by the rain."
"So no more pacing ourselves then, huh?" Kisame asked, turning to look at the trail of blood left by the man. The others followed his gaze, their faces serious and shoulders set in determination.
"Go," Fuguki said simply, and they shot forward.
They reached the end of the blood trail to find two corpses, one belonging to them and the other unfamiliar. Sute grimaced as she looked at their guy, lips pulling back in distaste as she eyed the patch of greenish skin visible on his abdomen beneath his shirt. "Do I have to touch that?" she whined. "Putrefaction's already setting in, that's gross."
"You're turned off by the weirdest things," Zabuza commented dryly, and she shot him a sour look.
"You've never seen a body go through the full decomposition process, have you?" she asked dryly, and he looked at her strangely.
"...Okay, seriously, what the fuck did you see on those battlefields?"
"Many things," she responded vaguely. Probably better to let him believe that's where she'd seen it. Seriously, she had the most twisted childhood in her old life.
Kisame, who'd at this point grown desensitized to Sute's random references to absolutely messed-up knowledge, easily ignored them and turned his attention to the other body. It didn't have any particularly identifying features, the jaw maybe a bit broader than average, and it wore rather bland civilian-style clothes. The head had been nearly shorn from the body, its neck a rather gory and disgusting sight as the beginning stages of putrefaction began to set in.
Unlike Sute, Kisame had no hesitation about touching the corpse, turning it over so he could rifle through its clothing. Lifting the jacket, he rooted inside and pulled out a small leather packet, opening the flap to slide out a small stack of folded papers. He unfolded one and skimmed it before holding it up. "Oi, Fuguki-san, I found something good," he called, and the taller man snatched it out of his hand.
"These are identification papers," he said as he read over it. "Likely a forgery, the village of origin listed here changed its name after the war."
"He's got multiple versions with different names," Kisame added as he glanced over the other papers. "Probably all fake. I don't recognize his face from any bingo books, think he's a mercenary-nin?" Trained shinobi with no existing village affiliation were rare, but they existed.
"If he was, he's good," Sute commented idly. "I don't know his name, but our guy was a jounin. I saw him at the hospital a few times, pretty sure he was wearing a Hunter-nin uniform at least once." It went without saying that Kiri had strict requirements for the Hunter-nin division, they wanted to guarantee that whoever tracked down missing-nin could take them down once and for all.
"Damn," Zabuza breathed. "I think this settles it, the others are probably gone."
"Which means it's our jobs to kill the rest," Fuguki said simply. As they turned back to the road the air had a subtle tension to it, all of them gearing for a battle as they began marching. Soon enough they could begin to see growing signs of a roving battle, kunai embedded in trees and sections of ground either overly smooth or roughly churned up in a telltale sign of being blasted by high-power water jutsu.
After an incredibly tense hour of walking they found another body hastily kicked into the bushes by the side of the road. One of the foreign agents since they didn't recognize him, probably killed shortly before the others. That put the confirmed casualties at an even two and two.
They moved slowly, carefully observing the area. At one point Fuguki stopped them and pointed out signs of a trap that had yet to be triggered, one of obviously non-Kiri design. A quick inspection of the area revealed a third corpse from the enemy faction, showing clear symptoms of a lethal poison Sute knew to be popular among Hunter-nin, but this time they had a name.
"This man's a known missing-nin from Iwa," Fuguki declared shortly. "He defected after the war ended with two others, all members of a team known as 'Scourge of Stone.'" Sute started at the name, her eyes widening.
"I heard of those guys back then," she said. "They were part of a division composed of powerful kekkei genkai users." She hadn't faced them, but she'd seen victims rushed back from the field during her time at the hospital. Iwa had access to some of the more destructive kekkei genkai, namely Explosion and Lava Releases, among others. Naturally, the survivors were not in pretty conditions. She remembered one patient had screamed a colorful rainbow of curses upon hearing that the trio responsible for burning off his hands had fled Iwa.
"Kisame, go to the river and send one of your sharks to alert Kiri," Fuguki ordered briskly, and the blue man nodded as he took off while Sute boggled him.
"Messenger sharks?" she said incredulously.
"Only in Kiri," Zabuza scoffed quietly, and Sute just slowly nodded. Weirdness of messenger sharks aside, she needed to focus. They had only confirmed one man's identity, and the other two members of the Scourge might still be around.
Two of the original investigation team had seen fit to try to crawl to Kiri. If the team had succeeded in wiping the hostiles out, they would have just left a message detailing the mission complete at some point. Most likely they'd left at least one of their teammates in battle with the enemy at some point—which meant there might be surviving hostiles after all.
When Kisame rejoined them they proceeded even slower than before, falling into a silent rhythm and wariness. It didn't take too long to find another battle site, this one even larger and more obvious than the rest. Small craters littered the ground and dented the trees, telltale signs of the Explosion Release, eliciting a quiet curse from Fuguki. Apparently the body they'd found in the bushes hadn't been the one responsible for this, which meant they had a pseudo-Deidara on their hands.
They found blood, but not enough to indicate a fatal wound. There were no bodies either, so either their guy was blown to smithereens, or he'd managed to escape battle and got pursued. Zabuza took lead, recognizing signs of someone fleeing in some nearby woods, and they followed him quietly until they reached a trail with two diverging paths.
"There's traces of people going both ways," he declared tightly. "I don't know which one's our guy." Fuguki scowled, lips curling back in distaste. Eliminating the enemy took priority, but naturally they also wanted to retrieve their agent alive if possible. Either way they'd have to split up.
"Ringo, Kisame, you two head that way," he ordered, inclining his head to the left path. "Momochi, you will lead me down the other path."
"Right." The group nodded and then split up, a heavy tension filling the air. For once Sute and Kisame didn't bother with their usual banter, both of them hyper-focused on the heavy atmosphere hanging over them. Kisame took lead, being the more experienced of the two, and Sute slid her knapsack down her shoulder just enough to reach inside and pull out her bokken. It was smaller than most standard-issue bokken, clearly designed for a child's hands, but all the same it still felt familiar and comforting in her hands.
Kisame glanced her way as she slid her hands into position, nodding at her in quiet acknowledgement. He knew that Ameyuri had given her that very bokken years ago, back when she tried to teach Sute kenjutsu before declaring she had no aptitude for it. She felt glad the woman had given up on training her so swiftly, because by the time Juzo had cajoled her into trying again she'd learned enough fuinjutsu to reinforce it. In a way it was one of the only gifts she'd received from her guardian, and holding it gave her a sense of security.
Now new seals decorated its length, barely two days old, and depending on how things went she might get a chance to test it today.
Her heart pounded as they slowly walked down the path, feeling more on edge than she'd felt since the war ended. After a few minutes Kisame stopped, his lips pulling back in an open grimace. He glanced at her over his shoulder and gestured to his nose—a silent signal saying I smell blood—and then held up three fingers, making her wince.
Three people, all bleeding. Kisame's sense of smell had always been sharper than most, particularly for the coppery tang of blood, but he couldn't identify specific scents like a dog. They had no way of knowing which of those scents belonged to their men. More importantly though, the blood had to be relatively fresh, Kisame couldn't detect anything older than a few hours.
Meaning they were likely still alive right now.
Her mind raced. Both sides started with five people, making for a total of ten. By her count they'd found bodies of two of theirs and three of the enemy. That meant at a minimum, one of those blood trails Kisame detected had to belong to one of theirs. Best case scenario, all three would be Mist ninja, but she wasn't counting on their luck to be that good.
She matched his own grimace, nodding at him to continue, and he nodded before turning forward and resuming. Sure enough, after a few minutes they found the signs of yet another skirmish, this one a bit messier than the last. Exploded stumps of once-towering trees filled the space, shards of wood scattered everywhere. In one area the shower of splinters outlined a noticeable gap in the rough shape of a human, suggesting they'd all hit a victim.
Near that human-shaped gap was a trail of small blood splatters, and Sute only had to take one look to know that it hadn't been there for too long. Definitely less than five hours judging by the color. The sparse trail led away from the battle scene and into the woods, but at the same time they could see a different blood trail heading another direction. The battle had not ended well for either side, and for whatever reason both parties had chosen to flee.
Once again, no bodies were present.
"Two people headed that direction," Kisame informed her quietly, inclining his head to the smaller blood trail. "The other one has one guy." She gnawed on her lip, pressing a hand against a nearby tree and squeezing her eyes tightly shut. They'd likely to have to split up.
Kisame didn't sense the small spark of chakra under her skin, pulsing down the length of the tree trunk and following the roots into the ground.
He didn't feel it spread outwards in a wide net across the network of roots filling the forest, spreading far and wide and mapping everything for three square miles.
Sute's eyes snapped open, two chakra signatures pinging on her awareness. She didn't use her sensory trick often so she couldn't normally identify people with it, but one of those signatures had been familiar enough that recognition instantly curled in her stomach. Her fingers balled into a fist as she pulled her hand away from the tree, her face becoming set with determination.
"I'm going this way," she declared, her voice holding no room for argument, and she took off before Kisame could respond.
Her earlier nerves vanished, replaced only by cold, steady determination as she ran. That brief sensory check had mapped the entire forest to her brain, allowing her steps to be smooth and confident as she wove through the labyrinth of trees. Turn left here, right there, jump over that rock—she leaped over a bluff overlooking a river, chakra burning in her feet as she skidded down the cliff side and kicking up dust and stone in her wake. A quick hop near the bottom and she landed on the water, racing along the surface at a swift and steady pace.
Cliffs boxed the river in on either side of her, the gap growing more and more narrow before finally splitting apart as the river opened up into the sea. Sute hopped onto the rocky shore and darted onwards, not caring for the noise she made. Finally the stone wall next to her receded inwards to reveal more trees, and she slid around the corner before skidding to a halt, her breaths rough and ragged.
Her exhaustion faded quickly, her face schooling into a blank mask when she saw the man waiting for her. "Oh, you're still alive Juzo."
"Fuck you too, Sute," came the flat retort. The Swordsman stood just inside the mouth of the forest, one hand on the hilt of Kubikiribocho with the blade's tip planted firmly into the ground. He looked tired, his chest heaving with each breath and his sleeveless black top full of small rips and tears, but he was still standing and in one piece.
Sute's posture relaxed as she looked him over, cataloguing his injuries. The gray sash usually draped around his waist had been torn and tied tightly around his right bicep, the fabric stained a still-damp dark red, while he sported a new cut below his left eye which had stopped bleeding. It could wait, she decided. "How deep's the cut on your arm?" she asked as she trotted over.
"S-Sute..." She froze as she heard the crunch of twigs from the trees followed by a low groan, her blood chilling as recognition triggered in her brain.
"Ao?" she whispered, her stomach lurching as she turned to face him.
The Hunter-nin who had spent so many hours teaching her to throw senbon lay sprawled in the thick undergrowth blanketing the ground next to the trees, his face twitching in pain as he moaned. Short splinters and jagged chunks of wood littered his back almost like a porcupine, dried trails of blood staining his face beneath either nostril, and his one eye had barely avoided the range of a heavy bruise darkening his right cheek.
He grimaced as he dragged himself forward, reaching towards her weakly with a red-tinted hand. Almost instantly she was at his side, dropping to her knees as she tossed her bokken aside to grab his hand. "Stay still!" she snapped, pulsing healing chakra through his hand even as she spoke. Fresh blood dripped onto her fingers from his palm, the skin completely shorn off to leave only muscle, and she bit her lip as she started trying to mend the skin only for him to suddenly cough.
"R-run," he ground out, and she stiffened, snapping her attention to his face. His lone blue eye bore into her, squinting and narrow with pain but full of a stony seriousness she'd never seen even during the war. "G-go, now..."
She didn't respond, just stared at him before her eyes slowly drifted past his face and towards his body. Thick splotches of blood trailed behind his feet, a steadily growing stain pooling beneath his stomach. Beneath a tear in his shirt she could glimpse the end of a long cut, wide and deep and curling around the width of his body. Her blood chilled, her green eyes widening as she recognized the shape of the cut from her time in the war.
A rush of air behind her, a looming pressure now directly behind her back.
Slowly, Sute turned her head, and found herself eye level with the hooked end of Kubikiribocho.