Against the World
"Did you know? In this language there are two ways to pronounce the word four. The first was yon, which is what was used in the beginning for our team. The second was shi, which is what people would use in the years to come."
-x-
Itachi did not hesitate when the base began to collapse, he immediately got out. His primary orders were to protect Team Four, but he was far enough away that he could not get to them in time to be useful in this situation. The girls should be in the barracks, sleeping and surrounded by capable ninja. He had to trust that they would be able to get out alright, that the others would keep them safe during the collapse and find a way out.
He was the first to exit the collapsing base, but it was merely seconds before the few who had also been in the above ground portions exited as well. Those in the underground portions—like the barracks or the infirmary—would take longer, given the exit tunnels were surely caving in.
A collapse like this shouldn't have happened. When the base was constructed the lack of alternative exits and the risk of something like this happening was taken into account. There were safeguards in place. That the base caved in regardless was worrying. Very few people would know how to disable the measures in place, and fewer knew how to get around them without doing so and setting off alarms. Without that knowledge, it would be a challenge that would take long enough for someone to notice, and act as warning to evacuate before things went south.
Itachi activated his sharingan. Though the darkness of the night impeded his regular vision, it was inconsequential with his doujutsu activated. Taking in the sights before him, he couldn't help but mutter a quiet curse.
"Avoid the top of the base as much as possible, we don't want to be in anyone's way of getting out." he ordered. With the base coming down, he wouldn't be surprised if those trapped decided the best way out was up. His superiors had yet to emerge, and until they did he was in charge. (If they did.)
He bit his thumb, ran through a series of hand signs faster than you could blink, and slammed his hand down. Six crows appeared before him in a puff of smoke.
He spoke directly to the crows, his voice quiet enough not to carry. "Base 121 requires immediate reinforcements. Three priority 1 assets present. We're outnumbered, with at least two S-rank threats."
As soon as Itachi finished speaking, his murder of crows took off, scattering across the sky in six different directions. They adeptly dodged the projectiles aimed their way until they were beyond human reach.
Itachi reached into his weapons pouch, pulled out a kunai and charged forwards, eyes blazing.
-x-
Twenty
I woke to a piece of ceiling debris hitting my forehead and panicked shouts. Perhaps there were cons to the top bunk I had not considered. I was sure Aiko and Sakura did not have such a rude awakening.
"Earth users, reinforce the walls and ceiling!" someone shouted. Below me, I heard Aiko slap her hands to the wall, and as I looked around the room I noticed perhaps a little less than a dozen of the other women present doing the same thing. "Everyone else, get ready, we're under attack."
I hurriedly jumped out of my bunk and got dressed, checking to ensure I had a handful of soldier pills in my pouch for easy access. I'd learned my lesson about keeping them in my seal last time. Once I was ready, I turned to Aiko. "Will dressing you disturb what you're doing?"
"As long as you leave my arms alone, go for it. Set out anything you can't put on me." she replied. "Hopefully I'll have time to get it on later." Sakura and I immediately got to work stripping her of her pyjama bottoms and getting her as ready as possible. Around us, I noticed the other women doing the same for the earth users near them.
I grabbed Aiko's storage scroll and put it in my pouch, then made sure Sakura had her own. With the amount of stuff in them, it was a bad idea to leave them behind. We really didn't want someone combing through the ruins of the base later on and finding them intact. They shouldn't contain anything incriminating, but you could never be too careful.
"What do we know?" I asked the room at large, when no one else spoke up. I stood ready next to my bunk like everyone else who wasn't busy reinforcing the room and preventing its collapse.
Was this natural? Or...
The woman who spoke earlier was now standing in the middle of the room with her eyes closed, making a hand sign. I recognized her as a jounin I'd seen around the base quite often. I was pretty sure she worked intel with Aiko. "There are over two hundred enemies within my range. Based on their chakra signatures I'd assume they're all at least chuunin, with several jounin mixed in. I'm certain there are more further than I can sense."
I pressed my lips together. This wasn't good. Overall, we had just over two hundred of us stationed here, and sixty of us were in this room. We needed to get out.
"I don't think we can hold this much longer!" One of the earth users shouted. "They've got someone trying to break through, a team probably. We need to find a way out!"
"But how?" Someone else shouted, sounding panicked. "The hallways and tunnels will be collapsed by now, there are no exits!"
"So we make one!" A third person replied, voice full of bravado. "If we can't go out, we go up!"
"How many are above us?"
"Directly, about a dozen." The jounin in the centre of the room, who must have been a sensor said. "But there are plenty more nearby."
"How do we make it through?" another of the earth users asked. "I don't think we can afford to spare one of us to make an opening."
"I have a seal." I said, drawing the attention of the women around me. "It will seal away anything within a given area—but only that area, which I can control the size of. I can seal away anything above us—including people."
"How long will it take you to get it done?" the sensor asked.
"Less than a minute once I know the dimensions of the space to seal." I said. I'd made the seal plenty of times, it was rote by now.
"Do it. Someone give her the dimensions."
Someone—one of the earth users—told me how far underground we were and how wide the area of the seal should be. I quickly unsealed my ink and some blank paper, and got to work on the seal. While I did so, everyone got in position near the walls.
"Are there any allies above us? Anyone caught in this will die or lose body parts." I cautioned once the seal was complete and my supplies were returned to my arm. I was standing on the ceiling, seal ready to be activated.
The sensor focused, and after a second she said it was clear. I activated the seal and jumped off.
Instantly everything above us disappeared. Half of a sword and a couple dismembered bodies fell in, only partially caught in the seal. We ignored them. (I desperately ignored the decapitated head full of familiar pale pink hair, I couldn't think about what that meant.) The seal started to flutter down without anything to support it and I snatched it from the air and stuffed it in my pouch. The earth users released their hold on the walls, and we all ran up and out of the pit the barracks had become.
"Four! Stay together! That's an order!" someone shouted.
I'd run up the wall near my bunk, so Aiko and Sakura were right beside me. We briefly exchanged a look, silently promising to do better at staying together than last time.
It was dark out, but looking at the sky I could see dawn was within sight. An hour away at most. I didn't have a lot of experience fighting this sort of battle in the dark, but it wouldn't be a concern for long, and I was sure I would adjust.
We were completely surrounded. The sensor had said at least two hundred, and it definitely looked like it. Unlike last time I immediately released two of my chains. The faint glow was a comfort in the darkness, though they made me a visible target. That didn't matter, they were my best weapon and we had to thin this down fast. Beside me Aiko, who was still in her pyjama top, unsealed her spear.
We immediately got to work, attacking anyone we didn't recognize—it was still too dark to check their forehead protectors. On top of that, while the majority of the women had time to get properly dressed thanks to the work of our earth release users, most of the men from the base apparently hadn't and lacked a forehead protector. I saw far less men than I expected. Perhaps they got out sooner and were too far from us, or perhaps fewer of them made it out at all.
At least the months on base had granted us at least a passing familiarity with most everyone here, so friendly fire wasn't much of a worry.
"Default formation." I told Aiko and Sakura.
Our default formation played to our strengths, Aiko handled defence, I focused on support, and Sakura was our main attacker. With her strength a single direct hit was enough to take out almost anyone. Even if someone anticipated her strength and reinforced their body with chakra the damage would be severe and leave them vulnerable.
We worked efficiently, I used genjutsu and my chains to distract and restrain our enemies so Sakura could get a hit in and Aiko used her spear to block incoming attacks. After all the time we spent together we fought like a well oiled machine. Despite my focus on creating openings for Sakura, I took out my fair share of enemies with my chains and a kunai. Likewise, several fell under the might of Aiko's spear.
Still, any we took out seemed to just be replaced by another. It was soon becoming clear that the sensor had been right, there were far more than the two hundred or so she had sensed. I didn't even want to think about the numbers. Ours were dwindling, and I was becoming more and more certain a good chunk of us didn't make it out, but more and more enemies seemed to come out of the woodwork.
Still, we were doing relatively well until beams of light broke through the darkness, felling anyone who was in their path. Yet they were controlled, twisting around our enemies and leaving them unharmed.
Who the fuck had a laser jutsu?
The beams moved fast, and there were too many of them to easily dodge, but fortunately Aiko had a trick up her sleeve, courtesy of my own seal work.
Sakura and I ducked behind her as she brought up the end of her spear and pointed it directly at the oncoming beam. It hit the seal I'd placed on the shaft and was absorbed safely into a pocket dimension before it could hurt us.
The creator of the beams seemed to notice we overcame his or her jutsu, and focused more of those beams at us. We dodged what we could, but they chased after us, and we relied on Aiko deftly manoeuvring her spear to absorb them one by one.
It was unfortunate the seal was still unfinished, in it's final form it could potentially have been a great help. Unfortunately, my plans for it were beyond my current abilities, and the addition was recent enough that even if it were complete, it was unlikely that Aiko would be effective with it without more time to train it. The next step was perhaps months or years away.
"What is this?" Sakura demanded with a snarl, quickly healing her arm where she'd been clipped by the jutsu. As talented as she was at dodging after training with Tsunade-sensei, the control our opponent had over the jutsu made it difficult to avoid. I was only unharmed because I was hiding behind Aiko more than she was.
"Storm release." Aiko answered. "A element combination bloodline from Cloud. Water and lightning."
Storm? This didn't seem very storm like to me. Whoever was in charge of naming these things sucked.
"We need to do something, whoever this is has made us their main target." Aiko said, absorbing another beam. Around us our fellow Leaf nin fell to stray beams, but a couple Cloud nin got caught, too. "Sekai, is there a limit on how much this can take before it fails?"
"There shouldn't be, as long as you keep timing it right. If you don't open the seal in time it could get damaged, but by that point we're already hit, anyway." I responded. "Let's get this bastard, maintain default formation."
My teammates nodded, and we took off towards the source of the beams of light, taking care of anyone who got in our way. Several times I used my chains to grab a corpse or cloud nin and used them as a human shield from the beams. The storm release user was clearly trying to keep us at a distance. Our fellow Leaf nin seemed to realize where we were headed, and helped clear a path for us.
I was almost surprised they seemed to trust us to handle this. They must have come to the conclusion that Aiko was best suited to defending against the storm release jutsu after seeing her in action.
Eventually, we got close enough to get a good look at our adversary. He was a tall man with dark skin and off-white hair, probably in his thirties. He ran through a series of hand signs just as we got into range.
"Storm Release: Laser Circus."
Oh fuck, so that's the jutsu responsible. Fucking laser circus was right.
With my target in sight, I tried to catch him in one of my genjutsu, but he shrugged it off like it was nothing. I tried again several more times and got the same result. My lips thinned in frustration. While I didn't think it would be quite as easy to take this man down—he was clearly on a whole other level—he was far better at detecting and dispelling genjutsu than anyone else I'd encountered. A genjutsu could trip up most for even half a second, but he didn't seem at all bothered by it. He just kept dodging Sakura's fists and shooting laser beams at us.
I would have to do better. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done. He broke out of a C-rank genjutsu like it was nothing—I wasn't sure it even had a chance to affect him before he broke it. I had four B-ranks in my arsenal and two A-ranks. I'd bet none of my genjutsu could delay him for more than half a second, a whole one if we were lucky. This man was good though, a second was unlikely to be enough with the distance he was keeping us at with that damnable storm release of his.
But... three seconds could be.
I signalled to Sakura that I would try to make her an opening, but that it would take time. This wasn't something I'd done in live combat, and even in practice it took me a long time to set it up.
I had to look busy, like I wasn't bothering with genjutsu anymore, like I was completely focused on using my chains to try and corral him into Sakura's fists.
Unfortunately, I couldn't make eye contact with Aiko to convey my plan, but hopefully my "defense, me" signal was enough to get her to understand that I would be unable to adequately protect myself going forwards.
My chains chased after the Cloud jounin, but he dodged them like they were an annoyance at best, comparable to a fly buzzing around his ear. That was fine. That was all they needed to be.
Carefully, I started to shape my chakra. The thing about layering genjutsu was that it was hard. Really hard. The end result would be that every time they escaped one genjutsu, another took affect, until they broke through each layer. Sure, you could cast genjutsu after genjutsu in rapid succession on a target and get a similar effect if the target was slow to break the genjutsu or you could cast them fast enough, but that wouldn't work with this man and lacked some of the advantages of a properly layered genjutsu. In this case I would need to do a proper layering, preparing each genjutsu all at once, and then inserting the chakra into his system.
One of the benefits of this were that it would only be one immediate disruption to his system. When Shisui was training me to detect genjutsu, layered ones like this were the hardest. I would catch one when the foreign chakra entered my system, but the next would often take hold without my notice at first. I expected this man would notice—I had to plan for that.
Furthermore, each genjutsu only took effect after the preceding ones were broken. You couldn't break them all at once. The target was forced to break each one successively. The more you layered, the longer it would take. It could be enough to distract him.
Of course, the downside was that, as I said, it was really fucking hard. The more layers, the more difficulty. You had to be careful to hold the shape of the preceding genjutsu as you added new ones. It was ridiculously easy to destabilize the previous layers, and collapse the whole jutsu, wasting (in this case) precious chakra. Layering two D-ranks bumped the difficulty up to B-rank. What I was about to try would be more than I'd ever done before, and effectively be an S-rank genjutsu.
I started with a C-rank. It was best to do lower level genjutsu first. Then I added my first B-rank on top of it. I started to add a second B-rank, but a beam that Aiko couldn't block distracted me and I lost it as I jumped out of the way.
I took a deep breath, and started again. That time I made it to the fourth genjutsu—an A-rank, before it destabilized again when I split my focus too much in favour of my chains.
I had three more false starts, but on the sixth try, I got it.
C-rank, B-rank, B-rank, A-rank, B-rank, A-rank, C-rank. Seven layers. On the last C-rank (the same as the first) I started making hand signs.
The man shrugged off the C-rank easily. It was a simple blinding genjutsu. The next one would induce an intense sense of fear. He broke that as well.
Sakura, who realized her opening was coming when I started making hand signs, started her approach.
The third made him dizzy and see stars, he slumped for a moment, but broke it.
A second had passed. Sakura was closing in behind him.
The first A-rank hit him. It made him forget where he was and what he should be doing.
Another second passed.
He broke it, and the next B-rank hit. He couldn't feel anything, he was numb.
Sakura was almost right behind him.
The second A-rank took effect. This was my best genjutsu, my most versatile. It wasn't as hard to break as some of the others, but it was my most complete. I could alter perceptions of ongoing events. I made him believe Sakura was further away than she was, and that he was going through the hand signs for his storm release ninjutsu. While this genjutsu was easier to break, the layering would disguise it's presence, and since I was keeping it fairly close to reality, hopefully he wouldn't realize he was even in it. Hopefully he didn't think I had the skill to layer a sixth (and seventh) genjutsu.
Three seconds, he broke it too late, right before Sakura's fist collided with his skull and turned his brain to putty. Clumps of brain, bone, and blood splattered everywhere as his corpse went flying east, towards the sun as it began to peek over the horizon.
I couldn't help but laugh, elated. I did it, and it worked. High off my success, I barely noticed the kunai flying towards me until Aiko deflected it.
"Head in the game, Sekai!" she said. "It's not over yet."
I nodded and licked my lips, she was right. I refocused, and threw myself back into the fray, with my teammates by my side.
-x-
The battle went on without end in sight. I couldn't count how many people my team killed, or how many were killed over all. From the number of corpses littering the ground I knew that it was hundreds, but the tide of enemies didn't seem to subside, no matter what we did.
I wouldn't be surprised if my kill count had already doubled. (In the heat of the moment this gave me a burst of pride, but later I knew I would feel sick.)
The number of people they sent after us—it didn't make sense. Yes, this was a Leaf base, but it was small, out of the way, and for the most part, unimportant. An attack to thin our numbers a bit would be reasonable, just enough to chase us out of Hot Water but that wasn't what they were doing. They were out to completely destroy us. You didn't send this many people for such a small target unless you wanted to leave no survivors.
Was this revenge for what happened in Frost? That was too petty. It had to be something else. Once this was over I would ask Aiko. While she'd never said anything to us these past few months on base, and kept saying everything was routine and boring, it was possible she'd learned something either officially in her capacity as an intelligence officer or through her doujutsu and didn't want to risk being caught telling us.
It had been four hours since we were rudely awakened, and Sakura had already taken two soldier pills. It was worrying, because there was no end in sight. Over a dozen times we'd grabbed injured comrades so Sakura could heal them while Aiko and I acted as bodyguards, and the intense field healing was a strain on her reserves. As our best medic her constant use of her skills was necessary, and it made me sick to think how many soldier pills she would take over the course of the day—or days.
Even with the efforts of Sakura and the other surviving medic, our numbers were dwindling. There were maybe thirty of us left, perhaps less. We couldn't keep this up without reinforcements. We needed to retreat, surely Itachi—who was the highest ranking person left—realized this?
Then again, I wasn't sure where we could even retreat to.
-x-
The first crow to return brought nothing but bad news. As did the second, the third, and the fourth.
Several of the nearby bases were running on a skeleton crew. They couldn't afford to abandon their positions, and didn't have enough combat capable ninja stationed there to make a difference. They asked that Base 121 not attempt to retreat towards them unless they could guarantee that they were not followed.
With how things were going, Itachi did not think that was possible.
The fifth crow returned with an offer of support, but not enough. As powerful as their ally in Rice Fields was, it might not be enough with this never ending tide of Cloud ninja, not to mention potentially blowing their ally's cover and ruining work and plans several years in the making. Still, as a last resort, Itachi would take the girls and run, leaving the others to cover their escape.
There foes would surely give chase, but Itachi was hopeful that he and Team Four could make it, even if he had to resort to amaterasu and a handful of soldier pills.
The sixth crow arrived a half hour after the fifth, and brought better news. Reinforcements. They were over a day away, but if they could draw away from this main battle, if they could run, and meet them half way, they might be able to make it.
Itachi sent the sixth crow off again, towards Rice Fields this time. It was best to keep their ally updated on their movements. Rice Fields was in the opposite direction from the reinforcements, but it never hurt to keep Orochimaru on alert.
-x-
Notes: This is barely my usual 4K per chapter goal, and I had to go back and add details to get it here. Sorry, but I figured you'd prefer a short update to nothing, and this seemed like a good place to stop. School is incredibly intense right now, I don't have a lot of time to do much of anything else, including write.
Regarding the opening quote, I figure most people know by now, but just in case... in Japanese four can be pronounced as yon or shi. However, shi is also how they pronounce death. Yes, this is why I decided they would be Team Four. Did anyone call that?
Pinky-Taicho was caught in the seal. Oops. Guess the sensor made a mistake... right?
I want to be clear that the scale in canon for S-rank is not the same as this fic. S-rank is not unbeatable, not "god like." I prefer to keep power scales more reasonable.
Fucking action sequences man. These are hard. I hope I did okay. Pacing these is really difficult, even when I know what I want to happen. I don't feel like a long, drawn out fight in this situation is unreasonable, but at the same time I feel like they took out Storm guy too fast. Thoughts?
I couldn't really fit it in, by while they were fighting Storm guy, the other Leaf ninja were keeping other cloud nin from interfering too much, if you were wondering.
Part of the rank of the genjutsu Sekai uses is an increase in difficulty dispelling them. I'm gonna say Sekai has genjutsu that can go up or down in rank depending on how difficult she makes it to dispel. Tbh I should have made more decisions about how difficult it is to do a specific things earlier, kept better track of what Sekai had done and on who, etc. So there might be some inconsistencies with her genjutsu abilities. Sorry.
Reminder that just because the intro scene in this chapter took place during the events of the rest of the chapter does not mean that they always do!
Thank you all for your support over the last few months. If people haven't noticed, if I go too long between updates on AO3 I add to the notes on the most recent chapter with a progress update.
Please forgive any errors, I'm getting this out in a bit of a hurry.