Chapter 24

Finding the remains of the battle proved more leisurely than Sute expected so far. She leapt through the trees easily, enjoying the breeze and passing scenery as she steadily headed southwest. The sun had begun to enter the descending portion of its daily arc across the sky, still a few hours away from touching the horizon and dusk tinting the air, but still low enough to let her know that evening would arrive soon.

For once, Sute was running in her usual shinobi gear and alone, instead of being fully suited up and backed by a team or partner. Since she had already been seen by a Leaf ninja, they decided it would be best to send her alone in case she ran into anyone, to hide their numbers. It would be safer to keep their hand close to their chests, especially so close to the border. If Konoha had any reason to suspect Kiri had an ANBU outpost around here, it would be far more trouble than it would be worth.

Running a fully-sanctioned solo trip without her mask was a real novelty. Sute couldn't remember the last time she'd been not only allowed by her superiors, but officially ordered to roam alone outside brief tasks during active missions. It occurred to her that right now would be an excellent opportunity to defect. She wasn't expected back for probably at least two hours, which would give her a decent head start, especially if she headed in a completely different direction than ordered.

Too bad I'm not ready right now, she mused almost regretfully. She still didn't know enough about Hunter-nin tactics to feel safe leaving, and her house back in Kiri had too much to randomly leave behind. In particular, her giant book of seals was still hidden away in her study, and who knew what they could do with that. She didn't even know everything that was in there yet.

No, her departure would have to be much more premeditated and planned than other people's.

She pushed the thought away as she consulted the seal on her wrist, using it as a compass to get her bearings. By her estimation she'd already traveled almost two kilometers by this point, so she changed course to scale the nearest cliff for a better look at the surrounding area. Her colleague who'd seen the bodies said the scene hadn't really stuck out too much, no major devastation to signal something had happened like other battle sites. They only noticed because one wanted to collect some local mushrooms for his own poisons.

It's actually kinda nice to have another poison specialist to talk to around here, she thought absently as she skimmed the area. They said it had been in a particularly dense grove near a cliff, so maybe... Aha. Her eyes settled on a tight cluster of trees, the branches partially bare and allowing little glimpses of the ground below. More notably she saw a glint of metal on one branch, telltale signs of an embedded kunai.

She climbed over and dropped down, landing a few meters away from the trees and strolling over at a cautious pace. As she approached she spied a dash of dark red smeared across the ground beneath the fallen foliage, almost blending in with the shadows and autumn hues of the leaves, but she had seen enough blood to recognize the colors it turned when dried. Judging by the humidity levels in the air and the relative vividness of the color, she estimated less than a day had passed since it had been shed. It probably happened last night.

As she drew closer, she found her suspicions only bolstered as the full remnants of the battle became visible. Two bodies lay sprawled across the ground, disfigured and coated in enough blood and dirt to largely mask the otherwise notable dull green and navy of the Leaf uniform. Tattered scraps of cloth also littered one area, the edges burnt and blackened, the brown hue almost perfectly camouflaged with the surroundings. She knelt next to one scrap, lifting it to rub between her fingers. Canvas. A tent?

Already she could piece together what had happened. The Leaf team had likely set up camp in this location the previous night, only for someone to get the drop on them. The ensuing struggle had been sudden and brutal enough to keep them from engaging at full power, and after the battle ended the attacker burnt the tent to hide at least some of the evidence. The fact only the tent was burned meant it had been ignited specifically, rather than get caught in the crossfire of a battle.

Yet they didn't try to dispose of the bodies, she thought with a glance to the two corpses. Once again she was struck by the brutality of the attack, the bodies barely even looked human anymore. If the guy burned the tent, why not burn the bodies too? Maybe the attacker was wary of the stench? Burning bodies were pretty pungent after all, it would likely be noticed by other people. Her nose wrinkled as she recalled the last time she'd smelled it, tongue sticking out in disgust as she hurriedly pushed the thought away.

Lingering bodies aside, there were a couple other details that merited immediate investigation. Usually, camps like this have a lookout... She frowned, letting the cloth flutter to the ground as she straightened to her full height and looked around. On an impulse she scaled one of the nearest trees, peering at the surrounding area for anything off. Soon enough she spied something pale, high in the branches of a particularly thick tree nearby.

One chakra-powered hop later found Sute standing on the branch, staring down at the remains of another Leaf ninja. Found the lookout. This guy could at least be recognized, unlike his unfortunate teammates. His glassy eyes stared up at the sky, his head almost completely severed from his neck by an ugly gash crusted with dry blood that spread to stain his shirt and the surrounding bark. His body had been dumped near the trunk where the branches originated, only his ghostly white hand dangling over the edge.

With this, Sute could form a much more solid picture of the attack. The attacker had snuck up on the lookout and slit his throat from behind—though that wound looks more like they sawed his throat, ouch—before descending onto the camp. With the lookout dead, his teammates had no warning before the assailant struck, abandoning stealth for a much more brutal approach which the just-awoken shinobi would have no ability to defend against.

All in all, a pretty textbook ambush. But even with the rough events figured out, it just raised more questions. Why dispose of the tent but literally nothing else? The lookout's body hadn't even been remotely hidden beyond what would naturally lay outside of view from the ground. The killer should have had plenty of time to dispose of the remains since it was an ambush; even if they were on a tight schedule, they'd want to cover their tracks.

Unless... They weren't completely alone?

The thought gave her pause, eyes flicking down to the remains of the camp with renewed interest. It wasn't often Sute got to encounter a genuine mystery in this line of work. Investigating the remains of battle sites and performing autopsies, sure, but an ambush with mysterious motives? This whole setup was tapping into that lifelong love of detective novels.

A giddy grin of almost childlike glee spread across her face as she surveyed the site, practically bouncing with excitement. Oh my gosh, I get to play detective! It was with a barely contained laugh that she jumped down, eager to resume her investigation.

And that laugh died when she felt a sharp ping on her inner wrist mid-fall, her face wiping into a blank mask almost immediately.

The moment her feet touched the ground she jerked her wrist upwards and twisted the wrist-guard around to expose the string of tracking seals connected to the ANBU currently stationed at the base, a total of five at present.

Only four seals remained.

A chill had run down her spine, her mouth pressing into a thin line. These seals, like many experimental ones, weren't permanent tattoos but instead temporarily drawn with a special chakra-infused ink. These particular seals only faded if she removed it, broke the connection on her end... or if the other person died.

Had someone been injured on a mission? It wasn't unlikely; Sute had no idea what missions the other ANBU might have, just a basic time frame for their anticipated return. But if that were the case, as the assigned medic she should have been alerted if someone had been injured upon her return to base, or at least held back if they anticipated injuries. The remaining four seals all pointed to the exact same direction, suggesting they were still at base, so it wasn't like someone had died on their mission.

As she puzzled over it her thoughts ground to an abrupt halt as that familiar ping surged again, and another seal faded before her eyes.

Sute froze, and then spun and took off towards the base.

Shit. Shit shit shit. As she ran she bit down on her thumb and swiped it over a storage seal on her left arm, unsealing her bokken and catching it without breaking her pace. If she was lucky, the two deaths just happened to be in the same direction as the outpost. If not though, then that meant someone had managed to locate their base and take down two people in a short amount of time. She could be dealing with anything from a particularly stealthy assassin, or a powerhouse whose skill made stealth unnecessary.

Another ping alerted her to a third seal fading four minutes into the run, and she silently ticked the odds in favor of the second possibility as she picked up pace. It took another ten minutes before the woods started to give way to familiar landmarks signaling the cabin wasn't far off, at which point she forced herself to slow and prioritize stealth over speed. Her heart pounded as she pressed a hand to a tree in passing, checking the root systems for any hints as to the situation.

The mental map her senses conjured made her falter, her eyes widening. One person halfway between her current position and the cabin, slowly crawling her way. And the cabin... Everything felt too still there, her mental map unable to reach inside, but the area around it feeling off. Sucking in a sharp breath, she moved at a slightly more brisk pace towards the crawling individual, her steps silent as she kept close to the foliage.

Only when the person finally came into sight did she drop stealth and rush forward, recognizing the torn uniform of the Kiri ANBU instantly. Even then, it wasn't until she got closer that she managed to identify the man as Amano. Bloody cuts marred his face and uniform, a deep cut slashed into his side through the armor, and the black fabric over his left leg seeming to cling to his skin too closely to be normal. He weakly lifted his head to look at her as she approached, his hand clenching atop the dirt.

"S-Sute," he sputtered, and Sute dropped down to examine him. Her breath hitched as she saw inky black spreading through the veins along the side of his neck, the skin taking a yellowish-green tint. Poison. And the nasty kind too.

"Report," she ordered even as her hands lit up with healing chakra to assess his state. Amano started to speak but coughed instead, grimacing as his eyes briefly squeezed shut. Seeming to think it over, he snapped his fingers to draw her attention to his hand before he began signing, the motion clumsy and shaky but still recognizable.

'Hostile invaded. One killed in bed, one near bed. Hostile dealt heavy damage. Commander engaged hostile for extended period. Ordered retreat.' Out loud he added, "To f-find you." So you could heal me and we could send a full report, he didn't add, but Sute understood anyway.

She cursed under her breath before glancing back at his injuries. She could tell from the diagnostic jutsu that the fabric of his pants had essentially fused to the skin, a strong indication of being burnt. More than that though, a good deal of his skin felt... loose? "Were you boiled alive?" she asked incredulously, and he managed an affirmative-sounding grunt.

Another curse slipped out, followed by yet another when she felt a fourth seal fade on her wrist. Their commander was officially dead. Lovely.

Glancing above Amano towards the direction of the cabin, she made a decision and got up, reaching into the pouch on her hip to pull out a silver case containing her emergency stash of poisoned senbon. "We need to relocate before they find us," she informed Amano bluntly as she selected one in particular. "I'm going to knock you out and transport you somewhere safe."

Amano offered no protest, just closed his eyes and rolled his head to the side to further expose his neck. Sute jabbed the senbon into his neck, sending harmless sedatives coursing through his system and swiftly knocking him out. Once his body visibly relaxed she returned the senbon and case to the pouch before slamming her hands together and calling on her greatest natural affinity.

Roots sprouted from the ground below the unconscious ANBU and wrapped around him to form a giant wooden cradle with large handles on either end. Two nearby trees began bulging and twisting until two copies of herself emerged from the bark, each grabbing a handle and running. Sute herself used a quick doton jutsu to smooth the ground to hide the evidence of her mokuton manipulation, and then leaped onto a nearby branch to follow her clones from the trees.

Sute rarely allowed herself permission to use mokuton, especially to an extent like this, but right now she was willing to make an exception if she saw anyone pursuing them. She still had no idea what they were up against, but Amano's condition made it perfectly clear she couldn't hold back. Once the river came into sight she dropped down just as her clones set the cradle on the banks, hopping inside and sitting next to Amano's head.

Her clones pushed it into the water and the makeshift boat rocked slightly before steadying, remaining thankfully afloat as the currents began carrying it downstream. She looked at the pair and barked a short, "Find shelter." They nodded and skipped across to the other side before disappearing into the forest, while Sute twisted her head to keep an eye out for any pursuit.

Ten tense minutes passed before her clones finally reappeared, silently signaling they had found shelter. One walked onto the water and grabbed the front handle to drag the cradle to shore, Sute hopping out to follow as they carried it much like before. Soon enough they were holed up in a cliff side cave, the cradle and clones reduced to harmless piles of timber used for a campfire to heat a pot of water while Sute bent next to her unconscious teammate to begin treating him.

Now that she had a chance to perform a more detailed examination, Sute could safely confirm that Amano had, in fact, been boiled alive. Along with her unfortunate experiences with the subject in her first life, she had seen her fair share of hot water jutsu back in Kiri because sometimes they had idiots who thought using a geyser or hot spring as a water source during a spar was a brilliant idea.

That was the key part here, though: they used an outside source. Controlling the temperature of water used in suiton techniques was technically doable, but it had an incredibly limited range. Otherwise, anyone would be able to freeze water into ice or make it hot enough to evaporate into steam. Sute had experimented with the latter and managed to pull it off by using fuinjutsu in conjunction with the ninjutsu, but the fact still remained she required external resources to do so.

There were no hot water sources near the cabin that could be used, meaning that the person almost certainly had a bloodline limit. Her eyebrows furrowed at the thought, biting her lip even as she carefully cut away Amano's armor and shirt to get full access to the giant cut on his side. No clans in Kiri had a bloodline like that, so it probably wasn't a former Mist ninja with a grudge. There went the most obvious suspects.

Her mind flashed to the decimated Leaf camp as she began mending the largest cut. Same culprit? She hadn't examined the two bodies on the ground before she got the alarm from her seals, but thinking back they both had distinctly red tints to their skin beneath all the dirt. They might have been boiled, she'd have to go back to check.

She had plenty of time to consider this as she went about treating Amano. With the largest cut sealed, her largest priority was the poison in his neck. She grabbed the pot of now-sterile water from the fire and set it next to him, taking a deep breath as she dipped her hands into it and guided the water towards his chest. Pulling poison out with water took time, giving her all sorts of flashbacks to Sakura using the same technique on Kankurou at the start of Shippuden. She could only hope this poison wasn't the fast-acting kind, and she'd have time to find the original and produce an antidote.

Stabilizing his condition took longer than she would have liked, the work in extracting the poison slow and tedious. After the better part of an hour she deemed she'd removed enough and moved on to treating the rest of his injuries. Another half-hour later she finally let the glow of her healing chakra fade, wiping her brow in exhaustion as she surveyed her teammate.

By this point she'd managed to treat the worst of it, leaving him nestled atop several clean towels and his clothes largely replaced by bandages. Removing the pants had been a difficult decision, because with the way the fabric had been melted to his skin it would be impossible to remove it without taking a layer of flesh with it. Even now the bandages began to tint red, making her grimace.

Transporting him back to Kiri would be hell. She winced in sympathy as she imagined the pain he would feel at even the smallest movement, unable to resist a shudder as she realized she'd also likely have to carry him. Sedatives could only work so well before crossing into dangerous levels, and Amano's immediate future guaranteed unholy levels of pain.

She sighed as she pulled out her fuinjutsu set, scribbling out a quick seal to keep him unconscious and hopefully keep the wounds sterile. As long as he didn't wake up and move, it should repel any bacteria and dirt, but it wouldn't work as a permanent or even long-term solution. Note to self, speed up work on the stasis project at home, she thought as she applied the tag to his forehead and activated it.

With Amano now in relatively stable condition, Sute finally allowed herself to slump to the ground with a tired groan. Between the mission that morning, running a total of four kilometers within one hour, using her mokuton, and the meticulous processes involved in treating Amano, she felt thoroughly exhausted. Her clones had applied some premade security seals to the perimeter before she'd used them for firewood, and she pulled out the paper tags paired with them and clutched them tightly in her fist.

Tomorrow, she would have to go track down his attackers and try to retrieve either the original poison used, or even better, an antidote. For now though she had to acknowledge she had no energy left and so she let her eyelids fall shut, sleep claiming her within seconds.

A burning warmth in her fist snapped Sute out of her slumber, her eyes popping open as she immediately snapped to alertness. She didn't sit up right away, moved her arm closer and loosened her grip on the tags to glance at them. Two of them glowed brightly, radiating a sharp sort of heat that warmed her palm, and even as she looked a third lit up.

Intruders steadily approaching. Less than a minute until arrival. Silently shifting and getting to her feet, she grabbed her bokken and crept towards the mouth of the cave, eyes narrowed as she pressed against the stone. The sky outside was pitch black, the sun long since set and night in full swing.

Her eyes flitted towards Amano's still form, quickly assessing his condition from a distance. Even in the darkness she could see him shivering lightly, sweat glistening on face. Feverish and sweaty, but no notable signs of significant deterioration. She felt the fourth and final seal activate in her palm, and exhaled quietly through her nose as her eyes darted to the ground by the entrance. They're here.

Sute kept her gaze trained on the ground, and the moment she saw a shadow she thrust into motion, exploding out of the cave and swinging the bokken in an upwards diagonal arc. The intruder jumped back but not fast enough to completely avoid it, the wood managing to whack against their chest.

The second she felt contact she pulsed chakra into her fingers and activated the seals on either side of the hilt, causing the blade's dull edge to momentarily sharpen enough to cut. She heard the distinct rip of fabric and flesh being punctured, and jerked the bokken away with a vicious satisfaction. Contact made. Poison distributed. In one fluid motion she rolled the wooden blade above her head and swung it down towards their skull, the other person barely managing to dodge.

As the figure skipped back moonlight caught on silver hair, making her freeze. Her stance shifted away from offense to a less aggressive, more defensive one, her eyes narrowing even as her heart began hammering in her chest. "Well, long time no see," she drawled, and Hatake Kakashi glowered at her from several feet away.

Sorry for the delay! I meant to post this last week, but it was Erasermic week in the MHA fandom, and it's legitimately my first OTP ever, so I ended up writing an eight-chapter fic for it over on AO3. It was actually pretty refreshing, and for once it DIDN'T spiral into some epic so hooray!

Anyways. Say hello to Kakashi! It's been a long time hasn't it? Considering the fact he's listed as one of the four primary characters on FF, he's barely appeared at all in this story. He and Sute have a LOT of catching up to do.

Not much else to say. Next chapter is fully written, but I'm iffy about some of the chapters beyond that and want some time to rewrite them, so I'm not going to commit to a specific day to post it. I definitely plan to post it next week though! That's all for now.