Chapter 10:

By mid-morning, Naruto and Shikamaru were on a train heading to their destination. Or at least, an area near their destination. Seki could not ride the train and did not want to disguise himself as a human to board, so he agreed to catch up with them on foot later on.

Shikamaru fell asleep in his seat while Naruto studied a map provided for them on the train. It was far, but doable in a day with the aid of trains. Going on foot would take longer and run even a veteran ninja ragged.

Shikamaru felt something bump him from the side and woke up, finding Naruto slumped on his shoulder, finally asleep. "I was wondering how long it'd take," he whispered to himself. Even Naruto couldn't keep going without rest, no matter his level of determination.

They slept until the train came to the fifth stop which was where they needed to get off. Shikamaru shook Naruto awake and they both got off on a wooden platform as the train sped away.

Naruto rubbed his eyes at the tall trees looming over the rectangular building in front of them. "Looks like it opens up into a forest."

They walked through the building where people were purchasing tickets and going through their luggage and out the other side into a dense forest with a single path winding through it. They took the path, smelling the trees the entire way and hearing the birds calling noisily. Wooden signs were posted everywhere, alerting people to the train's location in case they got lost on the path or just needed assurance it was there.

The trees began to thin out and the two could see a wider path leading towards a town positioned slightly downhill of where they were. This was the town they were looking for on the map but not the one they needed to get to.

They stopped at a restaurant for lunch and asked the waitress if she had any information about the town they were trying to find. She said she hadn't heard of it but had never left this town before either, so she wasn't too familiar with many places.

They asked several other people and only one knew what they were taking about. The old man pointed at a map framed on the wall of the post office and told them that the town was abandoned a long time ago.

"Abandoned?" asked Shikamaru. "Why? Were they attacked?"

"No," he answered. "Seems the place wasn't sustainable. An infestation of some kind. Those folks left and found new homes in neighboring villages and towns. Those who'd take them, at least. Some became homeless."

"Did any of those people end up migrating here to this town?" Shikamaru asked him. If they could track down one of those people, they could find the exact location of where they needed to go.

The old man looked around the post office, as if there were one nearby. "Well, I don't know. But we did get some people moving in twenty years ago. That's around the time the place was abandoned."

"You know if they're still here and where they are?"

"I've never actually spoken with them myself, only heard about it. I know the house, though. Woman keeps a lovely garden. Shares her extra vittles with the shelter up the road. Don't know her name, but the house should help you enough."

Naruto and Shikamaru paid the house owners a visit but only one person answered the door. She was older than them by a few years and admitted to having lived in the abandoned town when she was a child.

"It was so lovely back then; you should have seen it. I thought I'd live there my whole life. Then the rats got into everything. The food was useless, they burrowed under the houses and in walls. Droppings everywhere that made people sick. Nothing was salvageable, so we just left. One after another, families left the town until it was empty."

"I'm sorry to hear that," said Naruto.

"Rats don't just come out of the woodwork without a reason," said Shikamaru. "You make it sound like the rats just suddenly appeared. Couldn't you have hired exterminators to take care of it?"

"It was too much," she said. "And we never had that problem before."

"How could it have gotten to that point, though? You think someone lured them there?"

She gave a halfhearted shrug and said, "When I was little, I thought it was because we weren't doing a good enough job with the old shrine. We would leave offerings but one day it wasn't enough, I suppose. I wondered what we had done wrong but the adults said this had nothing to do with that. I was just a child, so I had these strange ideas."

Naruto raised his brow. "A shrine? In the town?"

She shook her head. "No, in the forest behind it. I remember having to go up a bunch of steps between the trees to get to it. We'd leave offerings of fruit and things." She pressed her finger into her cheek thoughtfully. "Thinking about it now, I suppose that's what attracted the rats."

Naruto and Shikamaru looked at each other.

Naruto's eyes darted to the top of Shikamaru's head and winced in alarm. The woman also made a noise and Shikamaru covered the cat ears with both hands.

"Sir," the woman began, pointing. "Your head…"

"Yeah," he said quickly. "Trying a new shampoo." He gave Naruto a shove. "Let's get out of here."

Memorizing where the old man had pointed on the map and hearing the woman's description, Naruto and Shikamaru went to the abandoned town a few miles away in the forest.

Naruto stocked up on some fruit before leaving and carried it in a cloth bag over his shoulder.

"Is there a point in bringing that?" Shikamaru asked. "I don't think there's anyone there anymore. Otherwise, the offerings would have continued to work. Isn't that how it goes?"

"Or the people did something to piss them off and refused to accept their offerings." Naruto looked down at the bag thumping his hip as he walked. "But you're right. There's a good chance they're not there anymore."

"Then why bring that?"

"Just in case." Naruto pressed on. "Who knows? They might have come back. It's been twenty years."

Shikamaru sighed, following without another complaint.

As it turned out, not too many shinobi could be bothered with Boruto's whereabouts. When Sarada tried to report it, a woman said that Shikamaru had already mentioned leaving with the Hokage to attend important business and assumed it involved Boruto. She told her not to worry and that the Hokage was probably already working on it.

The people in the Hokage building were actually more interested in the boy than Boruto. They wanted to know who he was, where he was from and what he was doing in the village. The only thing they could say was that they found him on a battlefield and brought him back for treatment. Since the boy would not reveal his name, a few shinobi were concerned he may have been a spy and wanted to question him.

Hiding behind Sarada, the boy glared at them.

Sarada suspected this was why her mother wasn't being too forceful with him, hoping he would give them answers willingly once he saw that they were trustworthy. If this boy had been beaten and robbed and abandoned, he probably had trust issues and wouldn't cooperate. Trying to force him would only make him think they were a threat and try to run.

If a shinobi wanted to get the truth out of a person, they could use jutsu to see into the person's mind or make them speak the truth. It wasn't physically harmful but it was an invasion of privacy and would further prove to the boy that they were untrustworthy, extracting answers using ninja arts.

"The Hokage gave him permission to be here," she said quickly, hoping that would stop things from escalating.

"You just said you found him on a battlefield. Which is it?"

Sarada bit her lip. "What I meant was that the Hokage would want us to treat him like a guest until he gets back. I don't think the Hokage would like it if this boy reported being roughed up by a bunch of shinobi, especially if he's the son of an ally."

The shinobi standing above them considered Naruto's inclusive approach and how he wanted every visitor to the Leaf to be treated with decency. However, they had to make certain any newcomer to the Leaf wasn't a spy of some sort. "If that's true, why hasn't he told you his name? If he wants to be trusted, we've got to trust him."

Sarada wasn't sure how to argue that. "Well… Well, maybe he'd trust us more if there weren't some angry Jonin standing over him being all scary."

"Scary? I'm just asking a reasonable question."

"He's obviously been through a lot. Give him some time and he'll tell us. Just leave him alone."

The Jonin put his hands on his hips. "There are faster ways to get this done."

"But-"

"It won't hurt him."

"He's a victim and you're treating him like a bad guy."

"Only because he's acting suspiciously. Won't tell you his name. What's that say?"

"That he doesn't know if he can trust us or not and your method would ruin any chances of that," she retorted.

"Maybe he doesn't know his name," said Mitsuki. "Could be amnesia."

"He was found alone on a battlefield," Sarada said, supporting Mitsuki's theory.

The Jonin wasn't convinced.

"We'll stay with him the whole time. We'll keep an eye on him. Promise."

She should have known that without the Hokage's explicit permission that the shinobi would do things by the book. Since the boy hadn't been given permission to be in the village, wasn't a villager and wasn't given the ok by the Hokage himself, since he was being uncooperative, they had little choice but to treat him like a suspicious character.

"Unless he gives his name, I'll have to bring him down the hall for questioning."

Sarada looked at the boy, pleading with her eyes. This was the only chance the shinobi was giving him before their treatment of him would be different, and she silently begged him to take it.

The boy moved behind her again and looked at the ground, refusing.

The Jonin sighed and moved to grab the boy by the shoulder. "Come along, then."

Sarada grabbed the boy's hand in hers. "Can I come with him? He might feel more comfortable if…"

"He revoked that when he refused to answer simple questions. If he can't give us his name, what are we supposed to think?" The Jonin pulled the boy away from her. "We're just going down the hall. Nothing scary. I just need to make sure he's safe."

Sarada let go of the boy's hand, telling him everything would be ok and that the ninja wasn't going to hurt him. The boy followed the Jonin down the hall and into a room.

Mitsuki waited until they were gone before sharing his thoughts with Sarada. "No one seems very concerned about Boruto. You suppose they actually know what's going on?"

"I still say he's with the Hokage. It makes the most sense. I mean, they probably caught him spying on their meeting and things unfolded from there."

Mitsuki looked away, worried. "Something doesn't seem right to me."

"I don't think anyone around here knows what's going on. The only people who would know are the Hokage and Shikamaru and they're away from the village right now. They probably have Boruto with them. Maybe we should leave this alone."

Mitsuki shook his head. "My unease tells me something's wrong."

"You're just not sure what to do when Boruto isn't around."

Mitsuki thought on this and agreed. "I still would like to know what happened. The field looked like some sort of battle took place. Boruto and the Hokage are missing along with Shikamaru. They could have been captured."

"I don't think such a thing would happen to the Hokage that easily."

"If they had Boruto, they could have coerced the Hokage to surrender."

Now Sarada was getting worried. "Well, let's check on that. Right now…"

The boy appeared beside them without a word. He was alone.

Sarada looked around. "That was fast. Where's the Jonin?"

"He sent me on my way. Seems he didn't think I was that important after all."

Sarada nodded slowly. "Uh-huh."

After that fuss, she couldn't imagine the Jonin giving up so easily. However, when she looked down the hall, she saw the Jonin leaving a room with a piece of paper in his hand. He glanced in their direction then turned and went on his way.

It seemed the boy was telling the truth to some extent and Sarada didn't ask anything further.

Up through the trees, Naruto and Shikamaru hiked to the abandoned town, reaching it by the late afternoon. Having been abandoned some time ago, most of the path leading to it was overgrown and there were no signs pointing them in the right direction, making it take longer than it should have.

In the clearing of trees stood the remains of the once bustling town, now crumbling buildings and a sea of long grass. With no upkeep, several buildings had holes in the ceiling and windows so dirty, it was a dense hazy of gray, showing more of their reflections than what lay inside.

Passing one home after another, Shikamaru walked up the steps of a house with the door hanging off its hinges to peer inside. It was fully furnished but dusty and dead leaves covered the floor like a rug. He went to a different house where the door was intact, putting up resistance when he tried to push it open. It groaned and gave way, revealing the inside of another fully furnished home, with children's toys still scattered across the floor, faded and speckled orange under a thick layer of dust. The sink was clear of dishes but when Shikamaru opened the cupboard, he discovered a fully stocked pantry and a family of rats eating their way through the twenty-year-old remains and nesting in what was left.

He jumped back in alarm, his cat ears popping out along with a long tail. The rats squeaked and he hissed at them in response. He felt something brush across his foot and jumped, yelping and running for the door.

"I can see why they left," he told Naruto, brushing off the disgust from his arms, feeling it stick to him like a spiderweb. "Nothing's salvageable after the rats got into it. Couldn't take the food, even the cans. I found old empty food containers they were nesting in. Food's long gone after all this time. It seems they somehow got into the cans, though. They're eating something in there."

Naruto looked at the gardens that were still producing food but riddled with holes. He couldn't see any rats but the holes were proof enough they were still present.

"The kitsune eat the rats and mice that would otherwise bother the people below the mountain," he told Shikamaru. "Because of them, everything's controlled."

Shikamaru listened, though he already knew this story, knowing there was a reason Naruto was bringing it up.

"When the offerings stopped, they ate their way through the rat population until there was nothing left. They weren't reproducing fast enough for there to be more food for them to hunt and whatever wasn't eaten migrated to where there was more food and less danger. The kitsune stayed. Because the other animals either left or were eaten, they were facing starvation and had to raid the human farm for food or go through the trash in town."

Naruto stopped in the middle of the road between a house with a broken fence and a house with broken windows. He looked ahead at the stretched of land obscured by houses, lined up like the rows in a crop garden. It was so eerily quiet, Naruto felt uncomfortable just standing out in the open in board daylight.

Further down, he spotted a sign for the shrine by the side of the road.

Naruto walked past the sign and onto a smaller street winding through the trees where it eventually ended at the base of a tall flight of stairs. He led the way up the stone steps to a level area spanning generously before a platform ravaged by time.

Naruto walked forward without a word while Shikamaru looked around with uncertainty. There was a shrine directly in front of them but Naruto ignored that, moving instead to the platform behind it.

Shikamaru stood in front of the small shrine where a stone cat sat grinning before a stone plate, empty. He leaned to one side to look at Naruto climbing up the two steps to the platform and set down his cloth bag, removing one piece of fruit after another.

"Wouldn't it make more sense to leave it in the cat's dish?" Shikamaru asked, pointing at the empty plate placed before the stone cat.

"No," Naruto said simply and left half the bag's contents on the ground in the center of the platform. He walked backwards until he was at the edge of the platform and sat on the bottom step, waiting.

Shikamaru sighed and stood beside him. "I'm pretty sure if the creature we were looking for were still here, the town wouldn't have been abandoned. Clearly, it left some time ago."

Naruto didn't say anything.

"I don't think this is going to work. If anything, we're feeding the rats. We should look somewhere else. They did say this was their last known location and could have left. I think it's pretty clear what we're looking at."

"When the kitsune were facing starvation and the cruelty of hunters, they contemplated leaving," Naruto said as if he hadn't heard Shikamaru. "But they didn't. Do you know why?"

Shikamaru didn't say anything, knowing Naruto would tell him no matter his guess.

"It's because it was their home," Naruto told him, looking at the offerings of fruit he left on the platform. "They lived there their whole lives. Generation after generations. Long before humans showed up and settled there. It was important to them. And important to the humans, even if they didn't understand that."

Shikamaru looked from the food on the ground to Naruto. "You think they're still here."

Naruto bowed his head. "For the kitsune, the offerings were part of their agreement. For others, it's a sign of respect and gratitude."

After saying this, Naruto willingly shifting into his kitsune form and sat on the bottom step with his tail resting gently on the ground behind him.

"Some people end up sharing the land with creatures like these and start to take notice of their work. Protection. So they honor the creatures with offerings to say thank you. After a while, people forget why they do it, falling into tradition." Naruto sighed, still looking forward. "I don't know what happened here or why they stopped, but I know some things are important and not easily abandoned."

Shikamaru knew being away from the village for a long period of time wasn't good but Naruto was right about them being the only people able to do this mission. He admitted he didn't understand as much about this as Naruto did, so he had to trust him, even when his gut said it would take less time to go looking for the creatures themselves than waiting around in case they showed up.

If the creatures of this land hadn't responded to the offerings twenty years ago, he doubted they would now. However, Naruto did have a point about not knowing why they didn't show up back then. If the people did things consistently, it made no sense for the creatures to suddenly stop. Something must have changed. Without knowing that, there wasn't much they could do. They wouldn't know where to look, for starters. They wouldn't know what would set these things off either.

Giving up, Shikamaru sat down where he was and waited next to Naruto. This did beat doing paperwork back at the office.