Previously on The Deception Gone Awry:

After a few seconds she stopped giggling and straightened up. "But on a more serious note, the investigating chuunin found the burning wagons here, and a trail leading that way, to the west of here. The problem is that the trail vanishes after a half mile or so, as if the bandits just vanished into thin air, and despite searching the surrounding woodland, they were unable to find any further clues as to their location on passage. She paused for breath and looked him in the eye. "I don't know how you expect to do any better than they did with this, but I wish you the best of luck Naruto-San, I will be back in three hours to return you to Konoha, be ready by that time. If you need to report anything to me before then, I will set the radio Neko-taichou gave me to channel three and you can report it through that." and with that she was gone, back into the trees, leaving Naruto by himself to observe his surroundings.

To both sides of him were the famous Konoha woodlands, created by the Shodaime and maintained by Konoha to this day, as a natural defensive terrain that they flourished in fighting in. The trail was easy enough to spot, broken branches and disturbed foliage pointing the way for pursuit. Using the correct handseal, Naruto called on a good portion for his pretty much only useful technique. "Kage bushin no jutsu!" in an eruption of smoke over a hundred Kage bushin appeared around him. "Right, you guys know what you are doing, follow the trail until it disappears, then fan out, search areas in sections, no crossing over. The clones saluted then ran into the woods with a cheer, they would find something, there were too many of them not to!

Chapter 9: The discovery and Graduation begins!

Half an hour later, Naruto was ready to scream in frustration at the lack of anything substantial discovered by his clones during their hunt. It was like Himako had said, the trail continued for almost a mile, before vanishing in the middle of a small clearing in the dense woodland. His clones had searched almost ten square miles around the area with nothing to show for it other than a new appreciation of the dangers of wasps to his clones when they were angered. In an attempt to take his mind off the problem, he walked down the road, kicking his feet against the ground as he tried to think of what he and his clones had missed, had the bandits backtracked after making the trail? Not likely, there would not have been enough time with Umi escaping as she did, and the hostages and loot were too heavy to lug around on such a plot. Kicking his left foot on the ground once more, Naruto took another step before his mind caught up with what his eyes had seen. Stopping, he looked back to make sure he hadn't been seeing things, but sure enough there it was, underneath the top levels of soil that he had just kicked off in his frustration was a dried but still red splash of blood on the soil, and not an insignificant one at that.

He created ten more clones to search the rest of this section of road whilst he thought about what he may have stumbled upon. Thinking back to what Himako had said, they had found the burning wagons where she had dropped him off, but Umi distinctly remembered two of the caravan guards being killed before she fled the attack site, so there surely would have been bodies and blood at the sight, but Himako hadn't mentioned anything and neither had Naruto seen any. The clones had quickly uncovered several more large pools of dried blood under the top layers of soil and dirt, which meant that this had to be where the attack took place, not where the wagons had been found. He activated his earpiece, which effectively connected him to every clone that was within range, speaking slowly and angrily. "Boys, head back to the road, I think that these bandits have pulled the wool over our eyes, and I really don't like when that happens." He removed his finger, the clones not replying to his statement but undoubtedly listening to him, and then he sat at the side of the road, the ten clones beginning to search both sides of the road and being steadily reinforced by clones arriving from the failed search to the North.

Settling himself in, he began to think in an attempt to work out how the bandits had pulled off the raid. The idea that the bandits, after having captured the caravan and it's occupants, decided to move the caravans away from the attack site did not take long to occur to him, but why move it if you can vanish your trail whenever you like, surely it was more trouble than it is worth. A cough from in front of him brought him back to reality and opening his eyes he found a clone looking down at him, face serious and eyes ablaze. "Boss, you are going to need to take a look at this yourself." Jumping up, he followed his clone quietly into the woodlands to the south east of the new attack site. They had gone almost 400 yards before the smell of death hit him, and breaking the foliage in front of him, the clone revealed a pile of corpses, more than a dozen at least, stripped of anything valuable, including weapons, jewellery and earrings that looked like they were torn out with no respect for the dead whatsoever.

"Half of them seem to be guards, killed during the fighting, though the others make no sense, the one on tops an old woman, she can't have been fighting them." The clone was obviously suffering from shock as he stared at the scene, the other clones in the vicinity steering well clear of the clearing in their search for anything else that might prove useful in the hunt for those that did this. Looking at the old woman more closely, Naruto realised something from the looks of her wounds. "She wasn't killed during the fighting, she was killed after it had all finished, her throat slit from behind. The bandits must have thought she was worthless as a captive, or that she would slow them down in their withdrawal." With such a morbid thought, Naruto decided that he was out of his depth now and definitely had something that counted as worth reporting to Himako.

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the radio that Yugao had given him before he had left Konoha. Turning it on, he twisted the dial on the front so that the arrows point on it pointed at the kanji for the number 3. Pressing the activation button on it, he spoke somewhat hesitantly into the set as he desperately tried to remember what the academy had told him about the terms and other semantics that were associated with radio communication. "Himako-taichou, this is Naruto, can you read me over?" there was an audible sigh before he got an actual verbal response. "This is Himako, I read you loud and clear. Have you decided to give up on your little tracking exercise over?" He had to try very hard not to get angry at the derision in her statement, instead concentrating on relaying the information he had across to her. "No, in fact, I have found evidence that the attack site you dropped me off at is in fact a decoy, I have a pile of bodies to prove it."

There was a moments pause before Himako replied once more, this time shock evident in her tone. "Are you sure? Of course you are, ignore that. I am on my way to the original site now, I shan't be more than ten minutes. Have a clone meet me there and lead me to where you are now. Any signs of a trail from your position away from the road?" A clone, that had evidently been listening in to the conversation, raised his head so he was visible over the foliage and pointed further south east before gesturing uncertainly with his hands. Reading the gesture as best as he could, Naruto replied. "my clones think they have found some away to the south east, though with all the animal tracks to and from the bodies, it's is not easy to be sure. I will have them spread out and look in that direction." "Understood, I am inbound now. And Naruto-San, well done with this discovery, Himako-chan over and out." he felt a welling of pride at the praise, but it drained out of him as he looked into the old woman's dead eyes.

Turning away, he leapt back into the trees, communicating the plan to his clones once more. Landing on the road once more, he began to piece together what had actually happened the day before. Bandits had attacked from where he now was, removing the captives and loot once they had pacified the guards. Then they had split up, some taking the wagons and heading up the road before burning them, some working to disguise the signs of the engagement that had taken place, and others leading away the captives and carrying the loot and bodies. This was no small bandit group carrying out these attacks, the strategy itself was complex enough to make Naruto think that rogue samurai were probably involved in some way. The radio buzzed to life with news that the clones had established an actual trail that lined up with what he had deduced to be the size of the bandit force, and he told them to follow it, being wary of traps and other deceptions, if the group were this organised they would leave little to chance.

True enough, by the time that Himako had arrived at the decoy site, more than a dozen clones had fallen to traps laid on the trail. She walked over to him, seriousness written all across her face. "Report, I want to see this evidence before I report it in and ask for back up." a thought struck Naruto at this point, what if the bandits, instead of passing as had been thought to the west, and then disappearing into thin air, had made that trail before the caravan had arrived, and then attacking and moving the caravans forward to that point. To do so would not only require knowledge of what caravans were using which roads, but also the rota of Konoha patrols in the region, in order to not get caught unawares whilst creating the trail. For such a case to be true, that would imply.. He shivered at the thought, before starting to speak. "Before we do that, how long before the attack would you say that someone patrolled this section of road?" she looked at him confusedly "No more than an hour or two, why is that important?"

With that piece of information, Naruto laid out what he had found, leading her down the road to where the blood was, and his theory about the fake trail. That implication brought her to a halt as she looked at him disbelievingly "Are you implying there is someone in Konoha that is passing information about the caravans to the bandits? That's quite an accusation to be making there Naruto." She looked round the clearing with the bodies once more before sighing. "But what you have found certainly points a finger that way. If that's the case then I will wait until we have investigated a little further before I call it in." Then it looked like something occurred to her and a grin worked its way onto her face. "Assuming that the bandits aren't too far away from us, then your going to be late for your graduation I'm afraid Naruto-San." he looked at her, what she was talking about? "What do you mean Himako-taichou? I thought we were just going to do a bit more investigating before we head back?" she looked at him like he was stupid. "You serious? If we come across them and think we can handle them, we are definitely not risking the possibility of you being right and a leak in Konoha warning them off. Stick with me kid, and I will make a hero of you yet."

Chapter break

Time skip: one hour

Screw being a hero, Naruto thought, if it weren't for the fact that they currently perched outside what seemed to be the entrance of the bandit base, he would have called it quits and told Himako to call reinforcements a while ago. The girl seemed to have forgotten about his supposedly subpar speed, and as such when they had discovered an easily followable position about half a mile from the clearing, where Naruto had left thirty clones to dig some graves for the poor victims, she had sped off like nothing else. He had very quickly ordered his clones to disperse, they were just hampering his attempts at trying to keep up. The only advantage of the situation was that he managed to finally finish a move that he had been working on, which utilised bursts of chakra to his leg muscles to boost his speed, and though it took a few rather catastrophic attempts, he managed to iron out the technique enough to catch Himako who had slowed to let him catch up once more. He had no idea where they were, other than the fact they were now deep into the wild lands of Konoha, thick woodlands which were prowled by predators that could even make a shinobi give pause if caught by surprise. The bandit base seemed to be built to keep those creatures out, depending on its location to prevent it being found by anyone else with a palisade wall surrounding it, a single entrance which had two very bored guards, and four ramshackle guard towers that served as the limits of the fortifications.

Whilst Himako had scouted the perimeter, he had used a tactic he had discovered the week before. When humans transformed into other things, they maintained their original weight, which was a disadvantage when say one pretended to be a kunai or a cat. As shadow clones were made of chakra, they could actually manipulate their weight to whatever they wished. Therefore, the henged clones that were disguised as birds could actually fly, allowing Naruto to scout the inside of the base from the air using them, and several clones disguised as mice covered the ground.

He discovered that there were about forty bandits up and about, either drinking, eating or otherwise lazing around whilst be waited upon by almost two dozen ragged individuals which had to be the ones that they had captured from the caravan. There were another 60 or so bandits sleeping either in the tents that littered the clearing, or inside the natural cave formation that probably also contained their leader. Upon her return, Himako had come to the same conclusion he had when he had told him what he had discovered, that they needed back up regardless of the risk of a traitor in their ranks, taking on that many bandits with hostages was suicide.

Himako leapt back into the trees to call in their find, as well as to try and work out their exact coordinates on the map she had with. Meanwhile Naruto decided to leap round through the trees to the southwestern guard tower, which he had noted was currently unoccupied through the use of his clones. Leaping up into the tower, he looked down into the camp physically for the first time. His clones vision had been fairly accurate, if a little limited in terms of from the perspectives that they had taken the views from. The mental picture of the camp that he had built up using their information had not be correct in terms of the rise up to the cave formation that he had not noticed in either form, and the heights of all the tents and other things had been slightly off.

Suddenly, he was distracted from his thoughts by a female scream from one of the tents not too far from his position, and a moment later a large burly semi naked bandit, with an eyepatch over one eye and a black beard stormed out of a tent facing Naruto, grasping the hair of a girl who could not have been more than thirteen by the hair, her ragged clothes ripped down the front. What caught Naruto's attention more than anything else was the bloody wound in the bandits shoulder even as he threw the girl to the floor in front of him. One of the bandits that had been lounging by a fire a few metres from the scene called over to the injured bandit with obvious humour. "This one giving you trouble then? That's another scar you can pretend to have gained on the battlefield!" There were bursts of laughter around the camp even as the large bandit turned red. "I just wanted a piece of something before the boss moves them on up to the meeting point, and then just as I was about to start, the girl up and stabs me!"

The girl forced herself to her feet, spitting at the bandits foot before readying the small knife she had in her hand once more. "that was for baa-chan you bastard, next time I will get your black heart instead of your shoulder." with that she charged forwards, swinging the knife with such lack of skill that Naruto couldn't help but wince at. The bandit dodged the blow with a growl, batting the girl away with a crack, looming over her as she gasped into the earth, drawing a deadly looking axe. "Well, you will serve as the example not to mess with us then, and I will make sure to go after your sister right afterwards!" Naruto didn't consciously remember moving at all, one second he was watching in horror, the next second he was rocketing into the camp, his fist making a heavy impact with the bandits face, sending him to the floor even as Naruto grabbed the axe from his surprised hands. Straightening up from his move and collecting his thoughts, Naruto looked round nervously as the other bandits jumped to their feet warily, drawing their assortment of weapons.

He realised the disadvantage of his position, essentially alone against almost 100 bandits, with 30 captives to protect and only half a dozen disguised clones that were currently undetected in a position to protect them. In addition, he hadn't filled his weapon pouch when he had woken up that morning, so he only had three kunai and six shuriken in addition to the bloody great big axe that he had just appropriated from the fallen bandit. Deciding to use a bit of bravado in an attempt to bolster his faltering confidence, he grinned and stepped forward, speaking loudly in what he hoped was a confident tone. "greetings, please find yourselves under arrest for murder, theft and slavery. By the law of the fire daimyo, I do hope you plan on coming peacefully." After a few moments one of the bandits burst out laughing, many of the others joining in, the one that started eventually recovering enough to wheeze out his question. "that's funny kid, real funny. You plan on arresting us? You and what army?" at that comment, Naruto couldn't help but grin, even as he whacked the downed bandit over the head with the haft of the axe as he tried to stand, knocking him out properly this time before hefting the axe to rest on his shoulder, freeing his hands to form a single hand sign, many of the bandits stiffening as he did so. "well, as you asked for it, I was thinking this one would suffice." And then in a cloud of chakra smoke, all hell broke loose in the fortified encampment.

Point of view: Iruka Umino, chuunin of Konoha

Naruto was twenty minutes late for the actual team sensei meeting, and more than an hour late for the academy graduation in general, Iruka thought wryly. At this rate he would be later than his assigned teacher, and though Iruka loathed Kakashi's lateness as much as the next ninja, he didn't want Naruto to give the man a reason to fail his team before his infamous test tomorrow, though he had doubts over whether the team the Hokage had put together would have any hope of passing the copy nins infamous bell test.

He remembered back to when he had been assigning the teams more than an hour ago, and when he had named Naruto as part of team seven, Sakura had spoken up in a confused and slightly angry tone. "But sensei, Naruto-Baka failed the test to graduate as a ninja, so why have you called his name out, especially as he isn't here?" deciding to try and avoid the question about Narutos location, he had instead chosen to divulge the truth in somewhat brief terms about Narutos graduation, including him beating Mizuki, though he left out how he had done so. By the end of the tale the class was silent, several of them looking very impressed with Narutos work, but the Uchiha had just scoffed and stated that Mizuki could not have been very strong if the dobe had managed to have beaten him. Iruka ignored the jab at his own skills with that comment, and had replied that Mizuki had beaten the Uchiha round the Taijutsu ring when the Uchiha had challenged him to a no holds barred contest as a challenge, so maybe that made Naruto stronger than the Uchiha in that case.

The Uchiha's fuming face still brought a grin to his face, as the third sensei, the beautiful Yuuhi Kurenai, came to collect team eight, comprising of the Inuzuka, Hyuuga and Abrurame clans heirs. Her collection was interrupted however, by a flurry of leaves that inferred a leaf shushin technique at the front of the room, a couple of feet from him in fact. From the flurry appeared two figures, one of which he instantly recognised as his classmate Himako, who looked a little roughed up but otherwise okay. It took him another moment to recognise the other figure, who looked like he had been thrown through a meat grinder. Naruto's upper clothing was in tatters, his trademark jacket gone and his t-shirt only just capable of being considered wearable, though considering the blood covering it from top to bottom, similar to his trousers that were now a cross between red and orange, some of it Naruto's judging by the vast number of cuts grazes and other wounds that were visible on his upper body.

The boy quickly turned on the spot, and spotting him through the one eye that wasn't swollen shut, stood to attention and snapped off a very wobbly salute. "Iruka-sensei, sorry for being late to the graduation class, but believe me, I have one hell of an excuse..." Catching the amused and slightly resigned look on Himako's face, Iruka got the feeling that for once, Naruto was actually understating himself entirely.

A/N: Terrible aren't I? Well it was either this or post another three thousand words I'm not happy with yet, so I think you all will be able to live another two or three days before finding out what has happened and how the fight went. Please review and tell me what you think, where you think the plots going and what about which characters you liked? I thought I had been a genius with some of my plot points but several people picked them up really quickly, I want to see whether this is the same across the breadth of my readers or not. But anyways, thanks for reading guys, until next time Ja Ne!