"Himawari! Get up!" Shikadai yelled. Himawari felt a strong gust of wind passing her. She was immediately aware of the danger. A kunai stranded near centimeters of her face.
"Byakugan!"
Himawari quickly scanned the environment, while Shikadai shielded her with his fan.
"One… Two… Three… Four… Five… There's five of them!"
"Where? We need to take them out!"
But Himawari already wasn't listening anymore. She knew what she had to do. It was time to see whether or not her training had paid off.
"Shadow clone jutsu!"
Four perfect shadowclones appeared beside her. Shikadai looked at her from the corner of his eye. Himawari was concentrated, pinpointing the exact location of the enemy. Himawari and the clones each took out a kunai knife. It wasn't a normal one. It had a funny shape and there were runes written on the handle. Shikadai could swear he had seen a knife like this somewhere before, but couldn't immediately make the connection. The clones threw the knives at almost the exact same time and suddenly Himawari and her clones disappeared.
"Rasengan!" a unison of five voices sounded.
Dust clouds arose from five different sites in close proximity to their camp spot, to what he assumed to be the locations of the five enemy Himawari was speaking of.
Suddenly the young girl and her clones appeared again, with in tow the five knocked-out criminals. Shikadai finally made the connection of where he had seen the knives before.
"You learned the fourth Hokage's jutsu!"
Himawari smiled. "Technically, it's the second Hokage's jutsu, but yes, I learned it. Pretty cool, right?" She shrugged. All her clones, with the exception of one, disappeared.
"I don't know who these tugs are, nor do I know why in the world they would attack us, but I'm sending just one of my clones and the thugs back to the village to drop them off for interrogation. Maybe dad can figure out what they were after."
Shikadai nodded in agreement and started walking towards their backpacks. Himawari's clone disappeared with the group of tied op criminals in tow, teleporting back to Konoha.
Suddenly, Himawari stopped in her tracks, noticing the deep cut on Shikadai's shoulder.
"How did this happen?" She asked concerned, moving his shirt aside so she could closer inspect the wound.
"I got blindsided by a kunai knife. It hit me pretty bad, but I was able to avoid the other kunai using my fan." Shikadai groined as Himawari examined the wound.
"Shikadai, where is that kunai?" Himawari asked as she was healing the wound. She sounded concerned and Shikadai was bothered with it.
"Just next to our bags, I think, if I've calculated the trajectory correctly. Why do you want to know so badly?"
For a moment, Himawari was silent, as she continued to heal his wound. She finally spoke again after picking up the used kunai and giving it a close look.
"It doesn't appear to be poisoned." She let out a sigh of relief. If the knife was poisoned, they would have been in a much more awry situation, as Himawari would have been forced to extract the poison, bring it with her until she could safely examine it, and hope that the universal antidote worked and Shikadai wasn't slowly dying from a poison..
"I think it's best for us to continue our mission. I have a bad feeling about this situation." Himawari said to Shikadai.
"Yeah, same… Although I wished I could have had some sleep first. We'll just have to put some distance between us and whoever is after us and take another break afterwards."
"Sounds like a plan to me. Lead the way, Shikadai!"
The two shinobi left their campsite and departed once again for the land of Birds, full of worries over the mysterious group of shinobi that attacked them and hoping to find answers once they reached Sasuke.
- Author's note: thank you for reading! Hope you enjoy this (short, I know) chapter. Also quick reminder that I don't own any of these characters-