AN: There'll be an update for Madness soon. Just busy with work and such. Here's a one shot I worked on a while back.
Mikogami Haruka loved Iwagakure.
It was one of those simple facts, like 'the sky is blue' or 'lightning jutsu have an advantage against earth'. It was a point of pride for her, that her love for her home village was known by the villagers. After all, what's the point of love if you need to keep it secret?
(Relations with Konoha, and thus the legendary Jiraiya's publishing company, have never been good, so Haruka had never once read the book series Icha Icha; though it's likely if she had, then she'd realize just how great 'secret love' could be.)
So she declared her love for her village proudly, from praising its location in the middle of a mountain range, or how most of the houses were built into the rocks, or how they had the coolest Kage ever (because he could fly!) She sometimes daydreamed about being the next Tsuchikage-because honestly, for as strong as Onoki was, he was definitely getting on in years-and leading her village to an even higher level of greatness was exactly the sort of thing she wanted in order to showcase just how much she loved her village.
True, she wasn't from a major clan, or anything, and she certainly didn't have a kekkai genkai. The Mikogami clan was just a few small families that had banded together during the Warring States era and had stuck together during the founding of Iwagakure. They certainly weren't the types to have forbidden ninjutsu locked away, or three separate kekkai genkai hidden in their bloodline. They did have a pretty good recipe for sake hidden away somewhere, but that's hardly a proper inheritance for a ninja clan.
She wasn't much of a looker, either, with the heavy bags under her eyes and the untamed mop of dark brown hair with curls beyond counting. Taller than most dudes and flat as a board, she'd been mistaken as a boy quite a bit throughout the Academy, and her sensei had outright told her to ignore what little seduction training she had picked up and just focus on beating people senseless. Not quite the sort of thing a young woman wants to hear, but Haruka never liked the thought of having to pretend to like someone, so she happily took her sensei's advice.
Sometimes, and Haruka hated herself for feeling this way, she felt...discouraged, when she saw some of the other ninja practicing, with their fancy clan jutsu and kekkai genkai,. Sometimes she wished she had some all powerful jutsu that could wipe the condescending smirks off the others faces, or maybe even the Explosive Release that would allow her to join the illustrious Explosion Corps. She'd snap out of it as quickly as she could, of course, not one to mope for long, and comfort herself with the fact that explosives were pretty dangerous, when you got right down to it, and having no fancy jutsu was better than blowing herself up (or having one of those weird dojutsu, like those weirdos from Konoha-one of those clans looked blind, for God's sake!).
So Haruka stuck to her guns, buckled down and focused on the array of earth jutsu her sensei had given her to study. Kakko was...well, a bit of a dick, if she was being honest, but he knew his stuff and he had taught her quite a bit, so she'd never call him such a thing to his face.
(The fact he could definitely kick her ass six ways to sunday definitely helped.)
Haruka was a freshly minted Chunin when the Third War started. She wasn't privy to all the top secret political stuff going behind the scenes, nor did she quite understand why they were even bothering to declare war. Weren't they shinobi? Shouldn't they be striking as hard and fast as they could under the illusion that was a time of peace, to inflict as much damage as they could before the declarations of war came in?
It just seemed like the smart thing to do, after all.
But she wasn't one to question the decisions of the Tsuchikage, and she definitely wasn't going to bring it up to Kakko lest he decide to give her some horrible tortuous task under the guise of 'training' again, so she just shut her mouth and went along with it. From what she had heard from her comrades, it was Konoha's fault for the war anyways, so she guessed that they were caught on the backfoot.
Her first mission in war time was pretty...well, easy. Here she thought she was going to be fighting a bunch of enemy ninja in all kinds of crazy battlefields, but all she had to do was drop off some supplies for a village near the border. It wasn't the exciting fight for her life she had been thinking it would be (and silently dreading), but she was happy for the routine mission.
Her second showed her just how horrific war could be.
It had sounded so simple. Destroy a few small stations in the Land of Wind to mess up the trade routes, weakening Sunagakure and giving them other issues to focus on rather than entering the war on Konoha's side. Haruka had honestly expected the biggest risk to be the unbearable heat of the desert, and the thought of any Suna shinobi didn't even cross her mind; they were the weakest of the Great Five, after all. Besides, wind jutsu didn't mean much to earth style, which Haruka was now very proficient in. She even picked up a few wind style jutsu of her own, just to broaden her repertoire and counter any lightning style jutsu.
Haruka and her squad took down the first supply station, with Haruka herself managing to land the finishing blow on the Jounin there. The aftermath was rather messy, and she really wanted a bath, but she doubted she'd get one anytime soon.
(Seriously, who the hell decides to live in a desert?! Don't they need water?!)
It was the second supply station where they faced issues. One of her squadmates had reported a single ninja guarding the station, and the decision was made to ambush him. Looking at the young man's brilliant red hair and rather attractive features, Haruka thought it was a bit of...well, a waste of such a handsome man, but orders were orders, so she conjured some earth pillars to give her squad an easier time of using Earth Jutsu, while also destroying one of the station's walls.
That's when things went to shit.
Suddenly there was far more than just one Suna shinobi. Disturbing puppets of all shapes and sizes were around them, and it took everything Haruka had to just stay alive, barely escaping injury due to her earth armor. The rest of her squad wasn't so lucky as to know the jutsu, and Haruka nearly puked as she saw her team commander be roasted alive by a flamethrower attached to one of the puppets. So she grabbed her closest squadmate who wasn't missing most of their limbs and fled across the sand.
His condition kept worsening despite Haruka using the few medical jutsu she knew to patch his wounds, and it was clear that the blades of those puppets were poisoned. He was suffering a high fever, puking, and kept alternating between feeling as though he was on fire and sleeping on ice. Her teammate begged for mercy, so Haruka gave it to him.
She nearly quit right there, but she managed to return back to the village to report the failure. It was her first failed mission, but that mattered little in the face of her comrades' deaths. Onoki seemed to age ten years when she reported the failure and the heavy cost, and sent her on her way.
Sasori of the Red Sands was inducted into the Iwagakure Bingo Book that very night.
She was given a two day break to get her head back on straight, then sent back into the field. Thankfully her next few missions went well, and she managed to keep going by convincing herself that it was for the good of Iwagakure; everything she did, she did to protect her home, and all of her comrades who were slain ultimately died for something greater than themselves.
But still, a mission to the land of Fire nearly broke her. It was a scouting mission, meant to explore the possibilities of a future invasion of Konoha. Nothing as dangerous as outright testing the village's defenses; the Tsuchikage was apparently confident enough in Iwa's alliance with Kumogakure that any sort of barrier system would be worthless under the combined might of two of the Great Five.
The mission had gone off without a hitch, with several secret trails having been discovered, and tentative contact was formed with a few guards in the capital city in order to launch a riot when the invasion began. Everything seemed to be going well, until Haruka's squad stumbled across a Konoha squad shortly before reaching the border. Both squads looked at each other in shock, before launching into battle.
It was a massacre, but this time Haruka was on the giving side. The Konoha team...they were just kids, and Haruka had to force herself not to hold back. Eventually all that was left was a little girl holding her kunai, looking as though she was fresh out of the academy.
Haruka walked towards the kid, steeling her heart; it was for the good of the village that she loved. Trying her best not to look the girl in the eyes, Haruka let loose with her rock-covered fist, crushing the leaf Kunoichi's skull.
It took a lot of scrubbing that night before she felt clean.
Kakko was dead.
She still couldn't believe it. Kakko was a total dick, true, but he was strong. Some people had even whispered that Onoki was keeping an eye on his career with the plan of grooming him to be the Fourth Tsuchikage.
But more than that, he had been her sensei; he had seen something in her, and Haruka still couldn't even begin to think of what it was, that convinced him to train her and teach her what he knew. She wasn't even close to his level yet, but she wouldn't stop training until she was. It was the only thing she could do, to properly repay him for everything he had done for her.
Briefly, her thoughts strayed to that of getting revenge, but she crushed those thoughts as quickly as they appeared. Kakko had given her such advice before, that the search for vengeance wasn't one for shinobi to undertake; they were ultimately just tools for the village and those who hired him. They went on journeys of vengeance for other people, not themselves. So Haruka swore she would keep such thoughts out of her mind, and would just fight as any loyal shinobi of Iwagakure would.
After all, if they won the war, then that would make Kakko's death mean something, and it would be a far greater revenge than merely killing the ones who had taken his life.
She kept her gaze upon the Stone Monument, the pedestal bearing a single stone that represented the Will of Stone for all shinobi of Iwagakure. Just as the single stone was ultimately meaningless and easily replaced, so too were the shinobi of Iwagakure; no matter how many might fall, there would be another to take their place, and the Will of Stone would stay strong.
She grabbed the stone in her hands, closed her eyes, and offered a prayer for Kakko; she didn't know much of the man outside of work, and she didn't know if a man as practical as him even believed in any semblance of an afterlife. But she still prayed for him to find peace in the Pure Lands, for her own sake if nothing else. Tossing the stone into the small lake surrounding the monument, she took another plain stone from her pocket, and placed it on the pedestal. She would replace Kakko in protecting Iwagakure, just as her stone replaced the stone of the monument.
The Will of Stone would remain strong.
It was, quite frankly, the largest gathering of shinobi she had ever seen in her life.
Nearly one-thousand Iwagakure shinobi, gathered at the border of Iwagakure, ready to march to Konohagakure and bring the war to a close. Far too many Iwa shinobi had given their lives to get them to this point, and Haruka knew that far more would give their lives before they'd see victory-and she knew that it was entirely likely she would be included in that number.
But that was fine.
She had lost so many comrades during this war, and had killed several enemies with her own hands. If she had to give her life to give Iwagakure a victory, and more importantly, to end this war, she would gladly do so. If it was for her home, she would do anything.
The order was soon given out that they'd set out the next day, once the Explosive Corps had finished their preparations. She had no idea what they were preparing, exactly, but she had witnessed a few of them near a tent filled with what appeared to be clay, and she could've sworn she saw a tongue on one of their hands.
(Clearly Konoha wasn't the only one with weird kekkai genkai.)
So she went back to the tent she had been assigned, and began preparing her supplies; kunai, explosive tags, chakra pills, everything she might need for the invasion. She even did a little practicing for some of the jutsu that Kakko had taught her before his death just to be absolutely sure she had it covered. Wiping the sweat from her brow, she grinned, knowing she was as prepared as she could be, and soon the Hidden Leaf would fall-cementing her home as the strongest, a title they deserved.
There was no warning. None. No sensors crying out about an ambush. No one found a corpse, killed to aid in an infiltration. Not even the hiss of a kunai, traveling through the air.
Just death.
Haruka looked around in desperation, trying to find the enemy. But every time she would spot him, he would just throw a kunai and flash away with a burst of yellow light, and another Iwa ninja would die. She saw Gari barking out orders and launching explosions, but the yellow haired Konoha shinobi appeared above him and slammed a blue spiraling ball into his skull, practically bursting it.
Haruka quickly began forming handseals, but a flash of yellow and a burning sensation at her wrists alerted her to her hands lying on the ground in a pool of blood. She was stunned at the sheer speed of it, but there was another burning sensation at her neck this time, and soon the spray of blood blocked her vision. She fell to her knees, desperately trying to draw in breath, but it was no use; she was losing too much blood, and she knew it. She began struggling to move, even as her vision grew faint, desperate to at least see who had killed her and so many of her comrades.
The last thing she saw before she finally passed was a yellow flash.